Carlos Manuel Álvarez False War review, recensie en informatie over de inhoud van de roman van de Cubaanse schrijver. Op 28 augustus 2025 verschijnt bij Fitzcarraldo Editions de Engelse vertaling van Falsa guerra, de roman van de op Cuba geboren schrijver Carlos Manuel Álvarez. Een Nederlandse vertaling van de roman is niet verkrijgbaar.
Carlos Manuel Álvarez False War review en recensie
- “A seething race across countries and heads, from Mexico City’s congested streets to Berlin’s ghostly quiet, and on. With exact translation by Natasha Wimmer, the book is like a collection of migrant tales, inextricably woven together in harmonious echoes – sometimes bound together by character, but often by similar preoccupations with displacement, identity, and desire. Alvarez’s writing is mesmerizing – his rhythm propulsive, his vision unflinching. A compelling and necessary book that lingers in the mind long after reading.” (Leo Boix, Morning Star)
- “Human displacement is the storm surge of our century, yet we only hear of the crest. Behind that swell rush the sequels of individual souls on the move, swirling, unravelling, adrift. Álvarez reels us into those milieus with such engaging detail we can’t help becoming comrades to his fugitives. A brilliant work of enchantingly real voices..” (DBC Pierre)
False War
- Auteur: Carlos Manuel Álvarez (Cuba)
- Soort boek: Cubaanse roman
- Origineel: Falsa guerra (2021)
- Engelse vertaling: Natasha Wimmer
- Uitgever: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Verschijnt: 28 augustus 2025
- Omvang: 268 pagina’s
- Uitgave: paperback
- Prijs: £ 12,99
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Flaptekst van de roman van de Cubaanse schrijver Carlos Manuel Álvarez
The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others left and never quite finished getting anywhere.
In this choral novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together a series of interconnected stories of the perennially displaced. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, lost in the Louvre, competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a trip for émigré dissidents, these characters learn that while they may appear to be on the move, in reality they are paralysed, living in permanent stasis.
With a fractured narrative that brilliantly reflects the disintegration that comes with uprooting, full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy, False War is an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation.
Carlos Manuel Álvarez was born in 1989 in Matanzas, Cuba. He is the author of The Fallen and The Tribe, and has written for the New York Times, El País and the Washington Post. He was selected as one of the twenty best Latin American writers born in the 1980s at the Guadalajara Book Fair; he was included in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under 40; and he was chosen by a panel of judges for inclusion in Granta’s second Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue. He is the recipient of the Anagrama Chronicle Prize for Los Intrusos and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for the French translation of his novel The Fallen.
