American Abductions
by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Dalkey Archive Press, 2024
Review by Andrew Cominelli
Dreams and Nightmares
Before her father gets kidnapped and deported by American abductors, a young Ada tells him matter-of-factly, “my dreams are an affront to the imagination of the American people.”
This line, like many others woven seamlessly into Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s explosive American Abductions, serves as a concise statement of this novel’s aesthetic and political aim. In a formally inventive novel about violent immigration policies and the trauma of family separations, Cárdenas openly revolts against “trauma plot” clichés. He endeavors instead, with a tacit salute to surrealism’s original political aspirations, to mobilize his characters’ interior worlds of imagination and dream against an external world of violence.
Still a child, Ada watches her father, while driving her and her sister to school, get pulled out of the car and roughed up by American abductors. Ada takes a video of it. It goes viral. It doesn’t matter: no one helps. No one can. It’s the last time she ever sees her father, Antonio, in person, though she spends a good portion of the novel either in long-distance conversation with him or listening to his voice on a series of recordings he’s made.
We get only oblique references to the systemic practice of abduction which has destroyed these characters’ lives: a “Racist in Chief” who has ordered the shadowy abductors to take children from their parents; abysmal detention centers; a practice of injecting the abducted detainees with cocktails of antipsychotic drugs. These terrors belong to our reality; they require no more exposition than the minimal, scattered references that Cárdenas gives us.
American Abductions can safely be called plotless. The key events—abductions and deportations of main characters, all of them Latin American citizens of the U.S.—have occurred well before the narrative present. Cárdenas slides back and forth through time. The novel’s central character, Antonio, has died by the time the action starts. Ada’s voice is one in a vast chorus of characters who, long after the fact, dwell upon a life-shattering abduction—their own, their child’s, their parent’s.
These voices emerge, taking their turns on stage, because Antonio, after his deportation to Bogotá, dedicates himself to interviewing other abducted and deported Latin Americans. The recordings of these interviews form the substance of much of American Abductions: crackling and wide-ranging conversations between Antonio and other abductees that race down the page.
Cárdenas is an experimental novelist with an affinity for unrelenting, energetic prose. Every chapter of American Abductions is a free-form dialogue between two or more (sometimes many more) people, but delivered as single, very long sentence. There are lots of commas, almost no periods, except at the very end of each chapter-sentence. The pace is breakneck, the focus roaming across a wide range of subjects, often taking us far away from the world of violence and deportation that forms the novel’s basis.
Trauma remains very much present, but some characters manage it with a dismissive wave of the hand. One of Antonio’s interviewees, Elsi, says, “…my brother was the first in our family to be deported he drowned trying to come back, The End…”
It's not that Elsi doesn’t want to confront it: it’s that she’s suspicious of how talking about a senseless thing will be perceived and, inevitably, manipulated by others who are eager to impose sense upon it. The senselessness, the absurdity, is all there is: it must be protected from the machineries of logic and narrative that try to co-opt and whitewash it.
Cárdenas dedicates tons of space to dreams and their interpretations, ruminations on writing, theoretical computer programs, and acerbic, joke-fueled dialogue. This novel is packed with goodies, literary and otherwise. Aura, who never met her parents, compares her plight to Sebald’s forlorn Austerlitz. Conversations about Borges’s “The Secret Miracle” and about Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser suddenly surface, then recede. There’s a computer program, created years ago by Antonio, uploaded into Ada’s car radio that, by voice-command, reads aloud random lines from the surrealist Leonora Carrington’s stories.
Throughout, the pain bobs into view at unexpected moments, only to plunge back out of sight beneath a swell of jokes, memories, thought experiments. Conclusions are never reached, lessons never learned. Nobody sets out to fix anything, or to overcome the system, or to best the American abductors once and for all. Indeed, American Abductions makes obvious its intention not to employ its characters in any sort of redemption story.
Straight narrative is too logical to handle the preposterous, the destructively absurd. To make narrative of a sudden and senseless abduction—to try to resolve or understand or make sense of it by transforming it into a story, would necessarily involve straying from reality, lying, and therefore participating in the same kind of absurdity that allowed the devastation to occur. And here, logic is the system’s tool—cold rightwing logic that advances unchecked, that keeps justifying and narrativizing itself to the point of deadliness. One character, Aura, says, “I refuse to play the role of the victim because that’s what the placid American killers want… look at the poor suffering Latinas and so on…” To play the “role” would be to accept a part in their plot.
If there’s any counterforce against the violence that echoes across these pages, it’s the inner dream worlds that emerge in these elliptical conversations. Cárdenas’s sentence-chapters are shot through with dreams and dreamlike imagery that would make any card-carrying surrealist smile. Eva remembers that, as a child, she “often imagined daylight” as “a talking sunflower carrying a briefcase.” A character who is not Roberto Bolaño, but is called Roberto Bolaño, has a dream in which he is “having a picnic on a meteor and my father approaches me and says sorry I am so late.” Characters obsess over their dreams, refusing to psychologize them just as they refuse to narrativize their tragedies.
The final picture is a kind of literary resistance. If racism, mass deportation, and death are the outcomes of inhumane logic brought to lethal extremes, then the surrealist flights that make up American Abductions are small victories because, in them, the illogical—i.e., human—is preserved, centered, even celebrated. The uncanny interior life for which there is no logical or functional place in the world, but which, when shared, forms the basis for connection, for love—this forms the crux of personhood in American Abductions. It also becomes the connective system, beyond the imposed network of shared pain, that links these characters.
Of course, it’s hard to say if this mode of resistance is enough. The damage has, after all, been done, and it shows no signs of slowing down. The walls of institutions enclose not only bodies, but minds. Auxilio, separated long ago from her daughter, imagines a government database somewhere that has on file her recorded voice reading a bedtime story to her daughter, saying, “when insects sleep, they are wakened only by poetic forces.”