What do you think?
Rate this book
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay
A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance (Catapult, 2018) in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico.
Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that "words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time.” He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, “a rural nowhere…that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.”
In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to “reinvent herself as the kind of person she’d been before” the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell’s former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika’s incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana’s exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of "home" vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.
Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that "words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time.” He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, “a rural nowhere…that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.”
In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to “reinvent herself as the kind of person she’d been before” the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell’s former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika’s incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana’s exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of "home" vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.
- GenresFictionContemporary
256 pages, Hardcover
First published April 26, 2022
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 24, 2022
TW/CW: Violence, death, sexual assault, racism
REVIEW: The first thing to realize when you sit down to read this book is that nothing really ever happens. Yes, there’s a weak story with Chris and Ana going back and forth on their relationship, and back and forth on whether they’re going to go to live in Mexico…but the vast majority of this book wasn’t that.
It was more a slice of life, looking closely at Chris’s neighbors, at his past, at what he’d lost in his life and trying to make it all make sense (which it doesn’t).
While Lazar’s writing is certainly lovely, I would have liked less of the pages and pages of brooding artist ennui and more about the actual story, which is kind of left up in the air with two ways it could possibly be going. I don’t really like that.
This wasn’t a bad book, but it was a rather boring one and could have been much better.
REVIEW: The first thing to realize when you sit down to read this book is that nothing really ever happens. Yes, there’s a weak story with Chris and Ana going back and forth on their relationship, and back and forth on whether they’re going to go to live in Mexico…but the vast majority of this book wasn’t that.
It was more a slice of life, looking closely at Chris’s neighbors, at his past, at what he’d lost in his life and trying to make it all make sense (which it doesn’t).
While Lazar’s writing is certainly lovely, I would have liked less of the pages and pages of brooding artist ennui and more about the actual story, which is kind of left up in the air with two ways it could possibly be going. I don’t really like that.
This wasn’t a bad book, but it was a rather boring one and could have been much better.
May 1, 2022
The topic (immigrants living in an unjust world) of Zachary Lazar's latest novel, "The Apartment on Calle Uruguay" was intriguing to me. I was really looking forward to reading this novel. Reviews posted by several media outlets gave it glowing praise. However, I just couldn't get into this novel. The plot bounced all over the place. Ideas, thoughts and the storyline often changed from sentence to sentence, making this a difficult novel to follow. Although the two main characters, Christopher Bell and Ana Ramirez, are romantically involved, their relationship does not feel like two people who are in love.
If you are a fan of Zachary Lazar, then you may want to give this novel a try.
If you are a fan of Zachary Lazar, then you may want to give this novel a try.
May 17, 2024
1.5 ⭐️s — I had really high hopes for this book but I feel like it droned on forever and nothing really happened throughout most of it. I liked the intertwining of recent politics into the writing but the lack of events/plot and non-linear writing really made this hard to stick out and finish.
August 31, 2022
The book has a floating, ungrounded, slightly nebulous feel. It’s epitomized in how the character, the lapsed American painter Chris Bell, describes the new apartment he and the Mexican woman, Ana, that he is in a relationship with move to at the end of the novel, he says it has a “quiet, somehow watery ambience”. I would say that describes the whole novel. Elsewhere, Chris says his life in Mexico sometimes “didn’t feel real, just as my past life in the U.S. seldom felt real anymore”. He describes his memory of passengers in boats in a channel being from everywhere in the world and, “moving through water without thinking about much of anything except moving through water”. A cafe he visits could be anywhere. In one place he even describes trees as not seeming to register anything. I was a bit frustrated that I couldn’t seem to dig into or hang onto anything as a reader, but I recognize that this sort of drifting, detached voice contributes to the theme. Both characters have left their countries (in Chris Bell’s case, two countries) and found themselves residing in Mexico, where they don’t root either, ending up in a “watery” apartment. Chris Bell doesn’t have a family of his own, though he has a connection to his deceased wife’s incarcerated brother. His career as a painter has drifted away also, though as the relationship with Ana forms into something more real he returns to it. The way he pictures his and Ana’s child at the end of the novel again illuminates this theme, this experience he has of being cut off from roots somehow, of not registering, of drifting. I did enjoy the writing and the seemingly innocuous, disconnected details.
December 14, 2023
First of all, this book is going to be reverberating in my mind for a bit. It is a carefully constructed story about a man living in New York an unspecified time after his wife has died in the home they created together learning to let go and move on. The story is set in 2017-2019. The tone of the book is that of a man who has been sleepwalking through his existence and who begins to awaken after meeting a Venezuelan expatriate whose family fled Venezuela after she was targeted by the dictator as a problematic reporter. The narrator himself is an immigrant who fled Israel with his mother many years earlier.
The story meanders between past and present, between his first wife's family and his current girlfriend's family and between New York, Louisiana and Mexico. The narrator is definitely NOT a linear thinker and many times in the story, he jumps around quite a bit without seeming to reach a conclusion before jumping on the next train. The characters are fully human and nuanced, even those who might appear to be jerks.
The author is quite willing to introduce a thread and then leave it hanging, unfinished. In fact, the book ends on an unfinished loose thread. And the beauty of this writing is that it allows the reader to ponder and draw their own conclusions.
For those that like fairly neat, tidy endings this will be a bit maddening. And I do feel the tension of the incompleteness. On the other hand, in these days where many stories have object lessons or conclusions practically smacking you over the head, being given room to draw your own conclusions is a relief. And the author does write the story with a trajectory of hopefulness and restoration.
The story meanders between past and present, between his first wife's family and his current girlfriend's family and between New York, Louisiana and Mexico. The narrator is definitely NOT a linear thinker and many times in the story, he jumps around quite a bit without seeming to reach a conclusion before jumping on the next train. The characters are fully human and nuanced, even those who might appear to be jerks.
The author is quite willing to introduce a thread and then leave it hanging, unfinished. In fact, the book ends on an unfinished loose thread. And the beauty of this writing is that it allows the reader to ponder and draw their own conclusions.
For those that like fairly neat, tidy endings this will be a bit maddening. And I do feel the tension of the incompleteness. On the other hand, in these days where many stories have object lessons or conclusions practically smacking you over the head, being given room to draw your own conclusions is a relief. And the author does write the story with a trajectory of hopefulness and restoration.
February 27, 2023
First published on Apr. 26, 2022. Out in paperback on Feb. 28, 2023 (Catapult)
Fiction/Literary.
I like the quietness of this book. Sometimes you just want to immerse yourself in fragments, scenes, ideas created through words, and that’s what this book does.
It’s a novel of ideas, a bit like looking at a painting (and, not coincidentally I’m sure, the protagonist is a painter). It’s also a novel of identity, change, and loss. There isn’t a whole lot of plot, although things happen; mostly, we are immersed in the protagonist’s interiority. There’s of reflection on and processing of the race problem in the US; this is mostly seen through the frame of the protagonist’s outsiderness, his questions about and issues with his own identity. This is also a novel that considers what it’s like to change with time, losing bits of oneself (mostly the confusing parts) and yet somehow becoming more whole.
I enjoyed this, but it is a musing read, a bit like an arthouse film, and so won’t be to everyone’s taste.
Thank you to Catapult for this DRC.
Fiction/Literary.
I like the quietness of this book. Sometimes you just want to immerse yourself in fragments, scenes, ideas created through words, and that’s what this book does.
It’s a novel of ideas, a bit like looking at a painting (and, not coincidentally I’m sure, the protagonist is a painter). It’s also a novel of identity, change, and loss. There isn’t a whole lot of plot, although things happen; mostly, we are immersed in the protagonist’s interiority. There’s of reflection on and processing of the race problem in the US; this is mostly seen through the frame of the protagonist’s outsiderness, his questions about and issues with his own identity. This is also a novel that considers what it’s like to change with time, losing bits of oneself (mostly the confusing parts) and yet somehow becoming more whole.
I enjoyed this, but it is a musing read, a bit like an arthouse film, and so won’t be to everyone’s taste.
Thank you to Catapult for this DRC.
November 4, 2022
This novel is about two people who see themselves as exiles and form a relationship with each other during the early years of the Trump presidency. Chris Bell is an Israeli-born artist, whose former girlfriend died, and Chris keeps checking on her incarcerated brother. He lives in a cabin on Long Island. Near him lives, Ana Ramirez, a Venezuelan exile, and they develop a relationship. Both feel very disconnected from American life. Eventually, they both settle in Mexico City where the apartment in the title is located. While I could relate somewhat to the characters alienation at times to American life, I found the book to be very stagnant as the characters never seemed to be going anywhere mentally.
October 9, 2022
I found this book to be a bit self-indulgent. While the chief character in this novel written in the first person is not the author, he surely thinks like the author. . There is not much of a plot. The title of the book is rather odd since the apartment in the book comes in quite late in the story and has no particular significance except for its location in Mexico City. There are a lot of miscellaneous characters with no real relationship to each other, only to the narrator. The writing style made it interesting enough to read to the end, but I really can’t recommend it.
July 3, 2022
Decisions
The apartment in the title is rented at the end of the book, the novel starting with an artist who had stopped painting, and was living on Long Island. There are neighbors, heard, socialized with, who eventually become more than neighbors. There's a loft space on the Upper West Side, which is rented by another artist, where the paintings from the past are stored. Women, two, have made, or make, strong impressions, which result in new decisions about life, and art.
The apartment in the title is rented at the end of the book, the novel starting with an artist who had stopped painting, and was living on Long Island. There are neighbors, heard, socialized with, who eventually become more than neighbors. There's a loft space on the Upper West Side, which is rented by another artist, where the paintings from the past are stored. Women, two, have made, or make, strong impressions, which result in new decisions about life, and art.
June 13, 2023
I love reading Lazar. This one is prob my favorite of his so far.
It's a sophisticated, pretty unflinching venture into rendering what a current consciousness feels like and sounds like... politically deft indeed and not afraid to confront serious shit others avoid or tiptoe around.
Dynamic and sublime - hope he does the trilogy he mentioned in an interview.
It's a sophisticated, pretty unflinching venture into rendering what a current consciousness feels like and sounds like... politically deft indeed and not afraid to confront serious shit others avoid or tiptoe around.
Dynamic and sublime - hope he does the trilogy he mentioned in an interview.
July 5, 2022
A man begins a relationship after nearly literally bumping into someone. It seems more out of curiosity and resignation that they continue seeing each other and gradually forge a life together. For a person with such a lively interior life - I love his vivid descriptions of places - his relationships in the real world feel very staccato and muted. There's no semblance of love, passion, or electricity. It is understandable when viewed from the lens of each character living in exile, that we hold back in fear of losing everything again, but it makes for a tedious read.
July 3, 2022
Well written with beautiful prose.
January 26, 2023
Had interesting framework but rambled aimlessly with endless run-on sentences.
August 9, 2025
A pointless read. There was no plot and it felt like rambling prose.
The author is apparently a professor. I hope he can teach better than he writes.
The author is apparently a professor. I hope he can teach better than he writes.
December 20, 2023
Beautiful prose in a scattered book, perhaps to reflect the exile that the characters feel.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews