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American Abductions
After her father is abducted by immigration officials before her eyes and deported to Colombia, Ada and her sister are left in an America as all-seeing as it is hostile; torrential and dreamlike, Mauro Javier Cárdenas’ story unfurls into a layered, poignant, and unflinching portrait of racism and xenophobia. American Abductions opens in a near-future America whose omnipresence of data-harvesting and algorithms has enabled the mass incarceration, and deportation of Latin Americans—regardless of citizenship. Now adults, Ava remains in San Francisco while Eva has joined their father in Colombia, tending him in his ailing health. When his condition worsens, Eva asks Ada to come see a nearly impossible feat, given America’s restrictions on Latin Americans’ movements. Ada, terribly alone, must come to terms with the violence of American society and the grief of lost community. Exploring the role of technology, mass society, and storytelling, the novel delves into the ties, memories, and lines of code binding communities together. Mauro Javier Cárdenas has been lauded as one of the most promising Latin American authors, and in American Abductions , his deconstruction of American society and state proves his generation-defining acuity and storytelling. The book’s polyphony of mysticism, technology, and philosophy calls to mind the perceptive dystopian visions of Philip K. Dick and the visionary stylistic fluidity of Samuel Delaney. The result is a sharp and metaphysical cautionary narrative, a masterwork examining the place of Latin Americans in an America that is always changing.
350 pages, Paperback
First published May 25, 2024
42 people are currently reading
2602 people want to read
About the author
Mauro Javier Cárdenas
5 books200 followersMauro Javier Cardenas is the author of American Abductions (Dalkey Archive, May 2024) and Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). In 2017, The Hay Festival included him in Bogotá39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
March 1, 2024
Following the principles advanced by Pierre Bayard in his How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, which I haven’t read, I had forgotten most of this novel, which I wrote many years ago, and so upon reading it recently I was impressed by how unforgettable it is. I do object to the absence of four commas on page 175, but you can easily add them if you are in possession of a mechanical pencil or the ability to pause without explicit signage.
December 30, 2024
There is something distinctly unsettling about reading this novel on the eve of Trump's second term—Racist in Chief, anyone?—especially with tech billionaire Elon Musk on his arm. Projected into a future that now seems shockingly close, American Abductions envisioned a US in which the mass deportation of Latin American migrants, not just those who illegal but naturalized citizens and sometimes even their children, is a large scale industrialized and profit motivated operation. Antonio, the hero of Cardenas' last novel Aphasia, has, in this scenario, been abducted in front of his daughter and deported to his native Colombia where he is presently dying, and eventually, dead. His daughters are grown. His youngest, a conceptual artist, moved to Bogota to care for him, while the oldest remains in San Francisco where she works as an architect. Add to this a cast of Latin American exiles and their families who form part of Antonio's project of recorded interviews and a network connected through the dream analysis of an online doctor and you have the basic sketch of this complex and original work. Each chapter is a single unbroken sentence, following a particular conversation or train of thought, and together they build the larger structure of the world of those who have been displaced and separated by this vast racist and anti-immigrant American agenda. As well, a rich thread of literary and artistic figures, sources, and characters is woven into the tapestry of the novel making for a highly entertaining and intelligent read.
Of course, depending on your willingness to engage, you will likely either love it or hate it.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2024/12/29/dr...
Of course, depending on your willingness to engage, you will likely either love it or hate it.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2024/12/29/dr...
August 3, 2024
[...], Elsi says, laughing, yes, Eva thinks, every time Elsi laughs her father laughs too, I can understand when we output a memory based on an input, Antonio says, but when there's no input I agree the brain mechanism is baffling, I thought you said you were a novelist not a computer programmer, Elsi says, I used to be a data-base analyst in San Francisco don't tell anyone, Antonio says, perhaps humans contain code that stipulates if no input available then output a random memory so as to make us feel less like blank robots, Elsi says, [...]
American Abductions is the third novel by Mauro Javier Cárdenas after The Revolutionaries Try Again and Aphasia. Aphasia was one of my favourite novels of 2021 and indeed my review proposed the book was the answer to the question 'If I imagined the perfect novel for me, what might it be?'
Which perhaps explains my relative disappointment with American Abductions as I came to it with too high expectations and, my rating notwithstanding, Javier Cárdenas remains one of the most interesting of English-language novelists and one, unlike most, genuinely attempting to do something different with the form.
American Abductions features Antonio from Aphasia (although disappointingly his actuarial sister is absent here) but the focus turns to his daughters Ava and Eva. Antonio was forcefully deported from the US when they were young, taken by the American Abductors, under the orders of the Racist In Chief, as he was taking the girls to school, and the narrative circles around this event and the stories of other separated families.
As with Aphasia, literary references and influences abound particularly Leonara Carrington (her story The Debutante a recurrent theme), Roberto Bolaño (and characters from his novels such as Ulises Lima and Auxilio Lacouture), as well as Silvino Ocampo, Julio Cortazar, Borges, Kafka, Jose Saramago, Amparo Dávila, WG Sebald (particularly Austerlitz) and of course a nod to the great Thomas Bernhard.
I’m not afraid of my story can I have the recording when we’re done I can prank these people hide the recording inside these walls what do you think don’t answer this is my interview, Roberto Bolaño says, greetings, my fellow whatever you still call yourselves, my name is Roberto Bolaño, which Roberto Bolaño, you say, I am the replica of the replica of Roberto Bolaño, I say, not to be mistaken with the replica of Roberto Bolaño, how are these two different, you say, is this an interview or an interrogation what is the difference I’m just confusing with you my name is Roberto Bolaño, no relation to the other Roberto Bolaño how can you be sure you are not a replica of Roberto Bolaño, you say, good one, I say, this is going to be a horror story, Antonio says, didn’t I tell you not to add yourself to my interview avoid these interferences or I will switch our dial to kaput, Roberto Bolaño says, the walls are howling, these people will say after we hide the recording inside these walls we need a remote control, batteries, speakers, a drill they don’t allow drills here for obvious reasons did you bring a drill [...]/
(from a longer extract in Socrates on the Beach)
Javier Cárdenas is one author attempting to engage with the question of the novel in the era of artificial intelligence, suggesting he may train a LLM on his own works, feed any new writing into the model, and if it recognises the work as his, rewrite the sentences. And here Antonio, prior to his deportation a database analyst for Prudential Investments has programmed his daughter's car to respond using the word of Leonara Carrington - and indeed the author trained his own NLPs on Carrington's stories (with the permission of her Estate) while writing the novel.
See some interviews in Minor Literatures, Publishers Weekly and Nautilus.
But if I had an issue it was the cleverness (and relative opacity) of the writing for me distracted from the poignancy of the story.
American Abductions is the third novel by Mauro Javier Cárdenas after The Revolutionaries Try Again and Aphasia. Aphasia was one of my favourite novels of 2021 and indeed my review proposed the book was the answer to the question 'If I imagined the perfect novel for me, what might it be?'
Which perhaps explains my relative disappointment with American Abductions as I came to it with too high expectations and, my rating notwithstanding, Javier Cárdenas remains one of the most interesting of English-language novelists and one, unlike most, genuinely attempting to do something different with the form.
American Abductions features Antonio from Aphasia (although disappointingly his actuarial sister is absent here) but the focus turns to his daughters Ava and Eva. Antonio was forcefully deported from the US when they were young, taken by the American Abductors, under the orders of the Racist In Chief, as he was taking the girls to school, and the narrative circles around this event and the stories of other separated families.
As with Aphasia, literary references and influences abound particularly Leonara Carrington (her story The Debutante a recurrent theme), Roberto Bolaño (and characters from his novels such as Ulises Lima and Auxilio Lacouture), as well as Silvino Ocampo, Julio Cortazar, Borges, Kafka, Jose Saramago, Amparo Dávila, WG Sebald (particularly Austerlitz) and of course a nod to the great Thomas Bernhard.
I’m not afraid of my story can I have the recording when we’re done I can prank these people hide the recording inside these walls what do you think don’t answer this is my interview, Roberto Bolaño says, greetings, my fellow whatever you still call yourselves, my name is Roberto Bolaño, which Roberto Bolaño, you say, I am the replica of the replica of Roberto Bolaño, I say, not to be mistaken with the replica of Roberto Bolaño, how are these two different, you say, is this an interview or an interrogation what is the difference I’m just confusing with you my name is Roberto Bolaño, no relation to the other Roberto Bolaño how can you be sure you are not a replica of Roberto Bolaño, you say, good one, I say, this is going to be a horror story, Antonio says, didn’t I tell you not to add yourself to my interview avoid these interferences or I will switch our dial to kaput, Roberto Bolaño says, the walls are howling, these people will say after we hide the recording inside these walls we need a remote control, batteries, speakers, a drill they don’t allow drills here for obvious reasons did you bring a drill [...]/
(from a longer extract in Socrates on the Beach)
Javier Cárdenas is one author attempting to engage with the question of the novel in the era of artificial intelligence, suggesting he may train a LLM on his own works, feed any new writing into the model, and if it recognises the work as his, rewrite the sentences. And here Antonio, prior to his deportation a database analyst for Prudential Investments has programmed his daughter's car to respond using the word of Leonara Carrington - and indeed the author trained his own NLPs on Carrington's stories (with the permission of her Estate) while writing the novel.
See some interviews in Minor Literatures, Publishers Weekly and Nautilus.
But if I had an issue it was the cleverness (and relative opacity) of the writing for me distracted from the poignancy of the story.
September 7, 2025
Might be my most disappointing read of the year, esp. for something I thought would have been a masterwork, here in this prescient, perplexing maelstrom of severed families, technology, literature, and the villainy of modern America.
Had thought to describe this as a Cubist or Pollock painting in literary form early on in my notes—deeply amusing that Cárdenas eventually name-dropped them in the novel. The anarchic chaos of Pollock/Cárdenas (and other similar lit: experimental, ambiguous, vague, deliberately vexing and puzzling) should work for me!—but it didn't this time.
I love Bolaño (who appears as a character), Sebald's AUSTERLITZ (whom Cárdenas seems to be doing a stylistic impression of), Borges' THE SECRET MIRACLE, and Terrence Malick too, Mauro (who seems like a cool dude based on the fact he also, in addition to the aforementioned, on Twitter, likes Tarkovsky, Tsai, Kurosawa, and a bunch of other things I adore), but the references (and form) outweigh the heart of the tragic story—for me.
That said, the core of the novel could not be more haunting, now that we are deep into 2025, with Cárdenas' "Racist in Chief," and ICE, carving families apart, making orphans out of kids whose parents, defying the word's definition, are still alive; making parents childless; rending families based on an impetus of hate and racism disguised as so-called good immigration policy.
This is novel I desperately wanted to love... should have loved, frankly. But in the end, I just didn't. Other Cárdenas works, however, still remain on the TBR.
Had thought to describe this as a Cubist or Pollock painting in literary form early on in my notes—deeply amusing that Cárdenas eventually name-dropped them in the novel. The anarchic chaos of Pollock/Cárdenas (and other similar lit: experimental, ambiguous, vague, deliberately vexing and puzzling) should work for me!—but it didn't this time.
I love Bolaño (who appears as a character), Sebald's AUSTERLITZ (whom Cárdenas seems to be doing a stylistic impression of), Borges' THE SECRET MIRACLE, and Terrence Malick too, Mauro (who seems like a cool dude based on the fact he also, in addition to the aforementioned, on Twitter, likes Tarkovsky, Tsai, Kurosawa, and a bunch of other things I adore), but the references (and form) outweigh the heart of the tragic story—for me.
That said, the core of the novel could not be more haunting, now that we are deep into 2025, with Cárdenas' "Racist in Chief," and ICE, carving families apart, making orphans out of kids whose parents, defying the word's definition, are still alive; making parents childless; rending families based on an impetus of hate and racism disguised as so-called good immigration policy.
This is novel I desperately wanted to love... should have loved, frankly. But in the end, I just didn't. Other Cárdenas works, however, still remain on the TBR.
June 6, 2024
This novel consists of about 30 (I’m guessing) short chapters, each a single run-on sentence long, each focused on another perspective of someone who was either stolen by or had someone they love stolen from them by the American Abductors (i.e. ICE). There are elements of (realistic, plausible) sci-fi, but the heart of the narrative is based in brutal fact, the reality of the many lives that have been and continue to be destroyed by racist, nationalistic government agencies bent on rounding up a mass of humans classed as problematic and disposing of them.
This is my first time reading Cárdenas (I own The Revolutionaries Try Again but haven’t touched it yet - fixing that soon), and I am completely blown away by his prose. He writes in a disorienting stream of consciousness and dialogue, and reading him feels like tumbling between threads of thought and feeling while just enough plot happens to allow you to clutch onto something concrete, usually something that breaks your heart. He writes with rage, pain, humor, and a deep literary knowledge that rewards readers familiar with the canon he’s pulling from. This is maybe the most exciting writing, on a sentence to sentence level, that I’ve encountered in a new release in 5-6 years (or longer, as I can’t seem to think of anyone else impacting me like this recently).
In short, read it. It deserves to be read. I will be reading it again after I read everything else I can get my hands on from Cárdenas. And not for nothing, but that cover is gorgeous.
This is my first time reading Cárdenas (I own The Revolutionaries Try Again but haven’t touched it yet - fixing that soon), and I am completely blown away by his prose. He writes in a disorienting stream of consciousness and dialogue, and reading him feels like tumbling between threads of thought and feeling while just enough plot happens to allow you to clutch onto something concrete, usually something that breaks your heart. He writes with rage, pain, humor, and a deep literary knowledge that rewards readers familiar with the canon he’s pulling from. This is maybe the most exciting writing, on a sentence to sentence level, that I’ve encountered in a new release in 5-6 years (or longer, as I can’t seem to think of anyone else impacting me like this recently).
In short, read it. It deserves to be read. I will be reading it again after I read everything else I can get my hands on from Cárdenas. And not for nothing, but that cover is gorgeous.
November 20, 2024
I was a little peevish about Cardenas's last, Aphasia, and I stand by that at least in direction if not in magnitude (absence, heart, fonder?) — it often failed to rise above pastiche of its distinguished raft of influences, first-rate or at worst 1.5th-rate pastiche, really lovely pastiche, but even so — but I am delighted to find that American Abductions is not merely a superior work but a very nearly perfect work, beautifully-paced, beautifully-structured, exemplary in its incorporation of real-world facts (which is to say, erudite, wide-ranging, not Wikipedial), and employing one of my favourite species of underrated joke the Messiaenic / messianic pun. all this underrates how well it works as a political novel — plausible, moral, restrained where it needs to be, lurid where it needs to be, sentimental where sentimentality is, in fact, the order of the day, which is to say, humane and human. I'd give it a 6 if I could!
July 28, 2024
challenged/moved/frustrated by this novel, which is at once so emotionally raw and holds the reader at such a remove. the wildly imaginative sci-fi trappings, so integral to the mechanics of the novel and the key way in which Cárdenas disrupts and expands upon the true-to-life immigrant narratives from which he draws, are so buried under the novel’s logorrhoeic structure that it’s hard to engage with what’s actually being said. there is a puzzle-box-ness to the pseudonyms and layers of conversation that is just……too Smart, too referential, too flashy. in his previous novels, Cárdenas really expertly balances mysticism, humor, literary history, with his straightforwardly affecting narratives - this has all the same ingredients, but the ratios never seem to turn out right
July 16, 2025
america needs to completely collapse and rebuilt because this wasn’t a fictional book
May 9, 2025
this was less of a novel and more of an experience. the thing about speculative fiction is that when you are aware of the nature of societal decline, your fiction becomes more like prophecy. this book was heartbreaking and i cannot believe it was written both "only" and "already" a year ago.
November 26, 2024
each chapter was one run-on sentence so it was a demanding read especially with the extensive dialogue. But rightfully demanding of focus i think
abandoned
July 4, 2024"Torrential and dreamlike" is right. This book will require way more focus than I have to dedicate to it at the moment. Come back to this one later.
March 12, 2025
A deeply moving surrealist nightmare that is unfortunately both timely and timeless.
Recounting the effects of family separations and deportations on both parents and children, Cárdenas paints a hypnotic futurist reality where being a Latin American is ostensibly against the law in the US.
To be fair, Cárdenas style might not be for everyone. During the first dozen or so pages, I found it a difficult read. The chapter-long run on sentences take some getting used to, but after a chapter or two your brain is rewired and suddenly the cadence and rhythm of it all makes sense and you can’t put it down.
I can’t recommend it enough and I’ll be revisiting it plenty.
Recounting the effects of family separations and deportations on both parents and children, Cárdenas paints a hypnotic futurist reality where being a Latin American is ostensibly against the law in the US.
To be fair, Cárdenas style might not be for everyone. During the first dozen or so pages, I found it a difficult read. The chapter-long run on sentences take some getting used to, but after a chapter or two your brain is rewired and suddenly the cadence and rhythm of it all makes sense and you can’t put it down.
I can’t recommend it enough and I’ll be revisiting it plenty.
November 18, 2025
Every chapter is a single sentence broken up with an endless stream of commas. Most chapters are interviews with victims of violent deportation (abductions), or people who have narrowly skirted these abductions, in a near future techno facist America. Dreams play an important role in the story. They serve as psychic echoes of past traumatic events, and as vehicles for potentially recontextualizing this pain. Many of the stories are striking, depressing, and all too familiar. The combination of private mass data-collection subservient to the savagery of the state is reminiscent of Mussolini,
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
A reality that quickly approaches.
In the end I couldn’t get past the form. The single sentence interview format is a bit freewheeling for my taste. It often reads like a transcript but the quotes are attributed after speech, which really slowed the experience and introduced a tension that never fully resolved itself (maybe the point?):
“I no longer mind that my son hates me, Silvia thinks, I don't know where my son is, Silvia says, when was the last time you, Eva says, do you have to record what I, Silvia says, to preserve your voice but I can, if you, Eva says,”
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
A reality that quickly approaches.
In the end I couldn’t get past the form. The single sentence interview format is a bit freewheeling for my taste. It often reads like a transcript but the quotes are attributed after speech, which really slowed the experience and introduced a tension that never fully resolved itself (maybe the point?):
“I no longer mind that my son hates me, Silvia thinks, I don't know where my son is, Silvia says, when was the last time you, Eva says, do you have to record what I, Silvia says, to preserve your voice but I can, if you, Eva says,”
August 31, 2025
4.5. incredibly smart, dreamlike prose, concerned with connection and communication, surreal and yet recognisable, sad and also very funny. loved the way technology is integrated into the narrative as an instrument of control by those in power but also as something to have fun with, play, innovate. i was disappointed, though, that this doesn’t go further into interrogating why these deportations are happening from a political perspective, nor the global forces at play in people are so desperate to get to america despite these draconian immigration policies. it was notable to me that the characters that have been displaced back to bogotà, buenos aires, etc didn’t really voice their experiences of living there—it was all about their time and experience in the US; latin america in this novel exists almost as a concept rather than a real place, despite people living there. & this is not so much a critique of this book, more a statement of personal preference but when i am reading a political novel, particularly a speculative one, i would like there to be elements of resistance, of opposition to the current order
October 28, 2024
“…even if the Americans kill me and I return as a ghost my haunting wouldn't be hey why did you kill me but I have come to tell you I am not your victim, Aura says, I am not your victim even if you killed me, Aura says, or I am but I refuse to play the role of the victim because that's what the placid American killers want, Aura says, that's what they've always wanted, Ada says,”
“they wanted to perform the You are Our Real Daughter Even If We Are Not Your Real Parents skit, and even though I knew they were performing this skit due to a dearth of imagination and a desire to think of themselves as humans abloom in love and so on, I didn't want to disappoint them by calling them out on it and saying quit it with your pantomime of parental love, although I know a pantomime of parental love isn't any different from what we like to call parental love,”
I loved the creativity with form here and it was also very beautiful and smart and densely full of brilliant references.
“they wanted to perform the You are Our Real Daughter Even If We Are Not Your Real Parents skit, and even though I knew they were performing this skit due to a dearth of imagination and a desire to think of themselves as humans abloom in love and so on, I didn't want to disappoint them by calling them out on it and saying quit it with your pantomime of parental love, although I know a pantomime of parental love isn't any different from what we like to call parental love,”
I loved the creativity with form here and it was also very beautiful and smart and densely full of brilliant references.
Read
February 16, 2025Would put me into trances of intense emotion unlike maybe one or two other things I’ve read in my whole life
I also don’t want to tell you or anyone else about my boring day — right and yet while the day is happening, her father wrote, I’m always either narrating it to you or having a conversation with you in my head
I also don’t want to tell you or anyone else about my boring day — right and yet while the day is happening, her father wrote, I’m always either narrating it to you or having a conversation with you in my head
Read
September 28, 2024I have no idea what I just read.
Read
March 3, 2025I truly do not know what I just read. And not in like a that was crazy vibe. In like a I didn’t know what was happening 80% of the time. When I did tho, I liked the writing!
December 21, 2024
A year of some great reads this may take the cake. Creative, wacky, poignant
June 27, 2025
I really loved this. I sometimes got a little lost in the surrealism of it all, but when it was good it was really good. The unique style really complimented the subject matter. Everything was elevated. So many moments in this book stopped me completely in my tracks--so good.
August 26, 2024
Extra star for Cheap Trick and Charles Mingus mentions in the final 10 pages.
Confounding, difficult, sometimes heartbreaking. If the intention was to convey the confusion and helplessness of separating families, mission accomplished.
Probably an academic work more than something for the masses, as I got maybe 25% of the references at best.
“One long sentence” sure seems to be the literary trick of the moment, no?
Confounding, difficult, sometimes heartbreaking. If the intention was to convey the confusion and helplessness of separating families, mission accomplished.
Probably an academic work more than something for the masses, as I got maybe 25% of the references at best.
“One long sentence” sure seems to be the literary trick of the moment, no?
October 31, 2025
Do not fall for the marketing spiel on the back of this book; whoever wrote it was working overtime to give American Abductions the best chance at being plucked off the shelves, because if they were completely honest about the content of the book, it would be a hard sell. It is nothing like PKD or Samuel R. Delany, and it has no cohesive plot. This doesn't mean it's a bad book, however.
American Abductions is about the deportation of Latin Americans living in a not-so-far-flung technocratic fascist USA, and it does have something to do with two sisters who lost their father, first to deportation and then to death, but the way it approaches telling these stories of abduction and torn-apart families is through a series of recorded interviews that have seemingly been scrambled, scrubbed, altered, perhaps even fed into AI language models, and then spat back out for a purpose I never managed to put a finger on, but maybe it has something to do with avoiding detection by surveillance systems? I'm not so sure. The result is what you get on the page is a largely incomprehensible jumble of words and disordered allusions that make up a codified string of speech for the reader to decipher.
The prose in this novel is actually quite fun once you get used to it. It is highly experimental, lacks punctuation, and purposely ignores the rules of grammar to mimic hurried human speech. I feel like every time I opened this book my pupils would dilate, and I would fall forward into a river of words that make little sense but somehow manage to translate enough raw emotion to keep me on the line. It's kind of like tuning into a fuzzy radio station, and every once in a while the signal becomes clear and you hear a tiny snippet of a familiar song before the signal goes fuzzy again. That being considered, it's impressive how Cárdenas managed to keep my attention for 230 pages by providing a visceral reading experience in lieu of a plot.
American Abductions is also packed full of literary references from Leonora Carrington to Roberto Bolaño, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, and probably more that I'm forgetting. It typically irks me when authors shoehorn literary name-drops into their works as if they are trying too hard to weasel their way into a circle of giants, but in American Abductions, these references are used to build a fabric of communal memory in a way I thought was marginally touching.
But alas, the success of this book lies in the readers' tolerance for nonsense, of which there is plenty. Luckily it is a quick enough read that I didn't feel my time was wasted (took me 3 days at my slow pace), but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless you enjoy high-risk, medium-reward experimental lit. Yeah, maybe I just "didn't get it," but this book is so purposely obfuscated that I feel "not getting it" is kind of the author's intent. You'll never understand the frenetic paranoia of being an immigrant in a fascist surveillance state unless you live it. Read at your own risk.
American Abductions is about the deportation of Latin Americans living in a not-so-far-flung technocratic fascist USA, and it does have something to do with two sisters who lost their father, first to deportation and then to death, but the way it approaches telling these stories of abduction and torn-apart families is through a series of recorded interviews that have seemingly been scrambled, scrubbed, altered, perhaps even fed into AI language models, and then spat back out for a purpose I never managed to put a finger on, but maybe it has something to do with avoiding detection by surveillance systems? I'm not so sure. The result is what you get on the page is a largely incomprehensible jumble of words and disordered allusions that make up a codified string of speech for the reader to decipher.
The prose in this novel is actually quite fun once you get used to it. It is highly experimental, lacks punctuation, and purposely ignores the rules of grammar to mimic hurried human speech. I feel like every time I opened this book my pupils would dilate, and I would fall forward into a river of words that make little sense but somehow manage to translate enough raw emotion to keep me on the line. It's kind of like tuning into a fuzzy radio station, and every once in a while the signal becomes clear and you hear a tiny snippet of a familiar song before the signal goes fuzzy again. That being considered, it's impressive how Cárdenas managed to keep my attention for 230 pages by providing a visceral reading experience in lieu of a plot.
American Abductions is also packed full of literary references from Leonora Carrington to Roberto Bolaño, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, and probably more that I'm forgetting. It typically irks me when authors shoehorn literary name-drops into their works as if they are trying too hard to weasel their way into a circle of giants, but in American Abductions, these references are used to build a fabric of communal memory in a way I thought was marginally touching.
But alas, the success of this book lies in the readers' tolerance for nonsense, of which there is plenty. Luckily it is a quick enough read that I didn't feel my time was wasted (took me 3 days at my slow pace), but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless you enjoy high-risk, medium-reward experimental lit. Yeah, maybe I just "didn't get it," but this book is so purposely obfuscated that I feel "not getting it" is kind of the author's intent. You'll never understand the frenetic paranoia of being an immigrant in a fascist surveillance state unless you live it. Read at your own risk.
November 24, 2025
When I started reading this I didn't know I was signing up for a novel with no sentences. I admittedly have not read enough literary fiction from 2020 onward, so maybe this is just a thing now that I don't know about. Turns out it wasn't really a big deal! I eventually settled into the flow, my brain acknowledging where pauses would naturally be while sliding right through them, creating an interesting temporal effect. I did find myself going back a lot to make sure I got who said what or if that was something even *said* by anybody. Finally after getting me comfortable with the punctuation, Javier Cárdenas threw another curveball when he started omitting the latter parts of characters' thoughts and dialogue entirely. Were those bits unimportant? Unbelievable? Unspeakable? It was often hard to tell.
Trauma, dreams, mundane life details, and niche intellectual interests were kneaded out and then folded over each other like dough. Memories of carceral violence blared constantly. Some kind of cybernetic implants enable interactive dreaming. There are robots. Whether they are physical gearboxes, chatbots in the dream world, or cyborgs created from human beings, I couldn't tell you. One character installed a novelty bit of code her father wrote in her car. Its use seemed limited to supplying her with pithy but unsolicited quotes from the works of Leonora Carrington. She needed the fond memory and the distraction, it seemed.
I appreciate the incorporation of natural language processing and vector embeddings in the story. I wonder when this was written because he mentions RNNs, which are kind of old-hat now that we find ourselves in the LLM revolution. It's an impressive prediction of some of the surveillance problems we are facing and are soon to face.
Trauma, dreams, mundane life details, and niche intellectual interests were kneaded out and then folded over each other like dough. Memories of carceral violence blared constantly. Some kind of cybernetic implants enable interactive dreaming. There are robots. Whether they are physical gearboxes, chatbots in the dream world, or cyborgs created from human beings, I couldn't tell you. One character installed a novelty bit of code her father wrote in her car. Its use seemed limited to supplying her with pithy but unsolicited quotes from the works of Leonora Carrington. She needed the fond memory and the distraction, it seemed.
I appreciate the incorporation of natural language processing and vector embeddings in the story. I wonder when this was written because he mentions RNNs, which are kind of old-hat now that we find ourselves in the LLM revolution. It's an impressive prediction of some of the surveillance problems we are facing and are soon to face.
October 20, 2025
Page 82 “…dear whatever you’re still called if you’re reading these words you won’t be able to relate to me…”
This was a hard read, especially as an immigrant living in the US so I had to take it slow. It also made me think life imitates art quite unfortunately sometimes.
I was supposed to read this for book club about 6 months ago, and it’s taken me a lot to finish, mostly because of the content but also partly due to the repetitiveness (which is the only reason why this didn’t get 5 starts from me). Lots of great references and fun bits but it was mostly sad. Definitely a book that preaches to the choir. At first I thought what a wasted opportunity, to know that the people who most should learn about the topics explored in this book will never read any of it. But once I finished it I realized that’s precisely the beauty of it. There is intimacy in hearing someone’s story, but doing so from the perspective of people’s innermost thoughts is on another level. So, this book is for us, and honestly, I love that. It’s a perfect reminder that there IS space for us, here and everywhere and in every way.
Also, Chile is mentioned!!!!!!!!!!!
This was a hard read, especially as an immigrant living in the US so I had to take it slow. It also made me think life imitates art quite unfortunately sometimes.
I was supposed to read this for book club about 6 months ago, and it’s taken me a lot to finish, mostly because of the content but also partly due to the repetitiveness (which is the only reason why this didn’t get 5 starts from me). Lots of great references and fun bits but it was mostly sad. Definitely a book that preaches to the choir. At first I thought what a wasted opportunity, to know that the people who most should learn about the topics explored in this book will never read any of it. But once I finished it I realized that’s precisely the beauty of it. There is intimacy in hearing someone’s story, but doing so from the perspective of people’s innermost thoughts is on another level. So, this book is for us, and honestly, I love that. It’s a perfect reminder that there IS space for us, here and everywhere and in every way.
Also, Chile is mentioned!!!!!!!!!!!
June 1, 2024
I hated the experience of reading "American Abductions." Does that mean I hate the novel? That's a different question. Mr. Cárdenas is trying to challenge the reader . . not in itself an unworthy goal. Every chapter is a single, several-page sentence, which demands close attention and patience . . not in itself an unworthy effect. But those sentences, which start as accounts of Latin American immigrants who have been forcibly separated from their families . . a scary concept . . digress into literary references, satires of pop psychology, bitter reminiscences, and elliptical philosophical arguments. It's distinctive and original, I'll give it that. But it's also exhausting.
Maybe Mr. Cárdenas is trying to depict the psychic turmoil of being a Latinx intellectual in a country which distrusts and despises you . . not in itself an unworthy project.
Or maybe Mr. Cárdenas is trying to demonstrate his cleverness and erudition and is using the genuine threat of American xenophobia as an opportunity to show off.
That would suck.
Maybe Mr. Cárdenas is trying to depict the psychic turmoil of being a Latinx intellectual in a country which distrusts and despises you . . not in itself an unworthy project.
Or maybe Mr. Cárdenas is trying to demonstrate his cleverness and erudition and is using the genuine threat of American xenophobia as an opportunity to show off.
That would suck.
November 4, 2024
“just as it made no sense to anyone but her to laugh at some of the videos her video had spawned for instance the video of her video but with sappy music instead of her sister politely asking the abductors where were they taking her father as if someone figured hey no one’s going to feel sorry enough for you people let me add sad violin music to the video of your father saying I’ve done nothing wrong, officer, or how about the video from a self-proclaimed irreverent news organization from China that, via computer animation as if from an obsolete video game, replicated the trajectory from her house to the sensitive location as if it were a car chase, the abductors rushing to drag her father out of the car as if it were a drug bust, the video game representation of Ada recording her father’s capture with her phone from the backseat of the car, waterfalls of tears surging from her eyes, no not waterfalls, more like some’s comical representation of lawn sprinklers superimposed on the eyes of the video game representation of me”
September 28, 2025
3.7/5
swirly and consuming. the book description is misleading/hardly does the style, structure, or content of the book justice!!! this honestly frustrated me when reading, multiple times i would refer to the blurb and just be blown away by everything that wasnt even mentioned, or was simply brushed over
this book genuinely does something new with the english language and is as much challenging as it is exciting. long long long run-on sentences of just dialogue; youre not inside any of the character’s heads, youre not in the room, youre living in the words. it takes a lot of energy and focus to read, but its ultimately worth it.
the amount of characters introduced abruptly through dialogue and chapter titles was both frustrating and overwhelming. lots of mentioning and using Latin American artists/authors as characters, which lowkey gave me fomo because i wasnt familiar with their work and felt i couldnt properly engage with that aspect.
overall an epic read and one i definitely have to revisit
swirly and consuming. the book description is misleading/hardly does the style, structure, or content of the book justice!!! this honestly frustrated me when reading, multiple times i would refer to the blurb and just be blown away by everything that wasnt even mentioned, or was simply brushed over
this book genuinely does something new with the english language and is as much challenging as it is exciting. long long long run-on sentences of just dialogue; youre not inside any of the character’s heads, youre not in the room, youre living in the words. it takes a lot of energy and focus to read, but its ultimately worth it.
the amount of characters introduced abruptly through dialogue and chapter titles was both frustrating and overwhelming. lots of mentioning and using Latin American artists/authors as characters, which lowkey gave me fomo because i wasnt familiar with their work and felt i couldnt properly engage with that aspect.
overall an epic read and one i definitely have to revisit
November 4, 2025
A challenging read, that's the first thing to say. Split into short chapters, each of which runs to one sentence (though I would go so far as to say that this is cheating on the part of the author, as there is no reason for each chapter to run on like this - the chapters are not one sentence at all, structurally and grammatically, but presented as one sentence for reasons I can think are more to do with style and impact than any other kind of logic), it would be a mistake of the reader to think they can come into this work and find the story wrapped neatly up with a little bow. There is an abduction of sorts - the deportation to Columbia of a Latin American citizen of the USA - and there are little pieces here and there that offer something to hold onto as you tumble into the author's dizzying version of reality... but when I reached the book and read the concluding sentence/chapter, the thought struck me - the chapters of this book could have been presented in almost any order and it might not have changed the outcome...
September 30, 2025
This book feels like a waiting room, you hear people talking (it's entirely dialogue) and can't quite make out their story, as the cover suggests. Or, maybe this was because I started this in a hospital three months ago in and out of sleep (dreams or nightmares are prominent here) and haven't kept track of the characters. The backdrop is a surveillance-fascist America (both alarmingly prophetic and obvious in hindsight). Despite the intriguing and horrifying happenings, I couldn't get into this book. It reminds me of Ducks, Newburyport, which I only read 70 pages (the fact that the fact that the fact that). Mostly this is because the book is completely in long streams of dialogue (albeit in short chapters). A bit confusing. Maybe if I was willing to untangle the narrative I might've enjoyed it more. The cover is spectacular and very fitting. Carrington is referenced throughout in the form of a quote generator, if anything this book made me interested in Carrington.
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