Aphasia
by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov. 2020)
Reviewed by Nathan Knapp
This novel, Aphasia, mentions—and mentions is a very weak verb, better would be alludes, though alludes also fails, so instead we’ll say references, which points us in the right direction but also falls short, we suppose we will have to proceed anyway, knowing the reader gets the general idea—W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Robert Walser, Conjunctions, Arvo Pärt, Olivier Messiaen, Richard Greaves, Helen Schulman, László Krasznahorkai, Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, Mary Gaitskill, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Adam Haslett, Stanley Elkin, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, The Silence by Ingmar Bergman, Michael Silverblatt, Bill Viola, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew by Dr. Seuss, others that I have missed, perhaps others that are not named but are alluded to, even if only stylistically, perhaps, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, and is about a man named Antonio, who, apparently, as I recently learned (since I have not read it), is also the protagonist of a novel called The Revolutionaries Try Again, except in that book, ostensibly about revolutionaries—probably not—Antonio hales from Ecuador (as Cárdenas does), whereas in this book, Antonio originates from Bogotá, Columbia, though he has lived in the States for all of his adult life (as Cárdenas has)—at all events, featuring (ugly if durable word) sentences that stretch for whole chapters or at least whole sections of chapters, many hundreds and thousands of words, defining its hero (forgive me for this word, hero should not be taken seriously, I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for several months now, part of it simultaneously with Aphasia, and so Hans Castorp, the soi-disant hero of that novel, is always with me now, even when I don’t want him to be) apophatically, through what he does not want to remember, through what he cannot not remember, through the questions he incessantly asks of others—his former wife, kids, sister, mother—possess a therapeutic quality, not just for him, Antonio, but for the others of whom he asks the questions, his former wife, his kids, his mother, what do you remember, he asks them, what do you remember . . . and as Antonio asks his questions there are parts of sentences (quoting whole sentences from this book would be impossible) that go like this: if I only could remember the one half of the things and writes a book out of it the works of Master Poldy yes, which isn’t actually from this book but another, longer novel written in Trieste-Zürich-Paris from 1914–1921, and there are also (parts of) sentences in this book that go like this: most of the time it doesn’t bother me when I lie down to sleep the brain feels more pressure when I’m walking because it makes me feel more predisposed to death, and there also other sentences that exert more obvious, that is to say punctuative, examples of form, like when Antonio the character cites the belief of the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes (our apologies for leaving him out of the above list) that we should remove the dramatic charge from fiction because nothing’s really that dramatic, someone is always leaving us or dying or going to the insane asylum, these miseries just happen to us and will continue to happen to us, to which she replied by speaking of metaphorical icebergs, the surface of things, etc., but Antonio did not refute these handed-down notions of narrative because he wanted to be amenable so she would agree to a handful of Fridays with him during summer #8, writes Mauro Javier Cárdenas (and António Lobo Antunes), speaking of summers with numbers, and one of the most striking things in this book is the way that its protagonist simultaneously exists in so many different versions of time, as in he is almost thinking of or writing about some other time than the time he currently inhabits, he is a person almost entirely devoid of the present, as he himself (Antonio Jose Jiménez) several times confesses that nothing in the present is able to touch him or is real for him, and yet the novel is so invested in its own relationship to time that it arranges itself along a series of at-first mysterious signifiers—S8, F8, W8, S8, SP9—which are eventually revealed to be the various seasons during which the action (wrong word) of the book takes place, a kind of recognition that the mind of the individual does not really exist in linear time but rather drifts in an immense sea of it (apologies for the Mann contained in this metaphor), thrown about by waves which rise and waves which ebb, whereas the rest of the individual, the part that is not mind and not emotion, still has to endure the seasons, the years as they fall across one another like timbers, the branches of the year-trees crisscrossing like deadfall waiting for a forest fire, waiting for that eventual inevitable flame, touching in more places than can be counted, time laid over and through time itself, so much so that when one is sitting, like Antonio, at one’s desk, pretending to do one’s work as a data analyst for Prudential Investments (the kind Antonio cannot seem to make), one can also be remembering—while trying not to remember—that one’s sister as a girl was raped by one’s father, that one’s sister now hears voices, that this sister is in jail, or missing altogether, and at the same time remaining anxiously aware that it is a distinct possibility that in the near future the woman one (Antonio) met for sex last night might attempt to contact one’s former wife and two daughters (Antonio’s former wife, Antonio’s daughters), or thinking about one’s timeless (recurring) nightmare of meeting one’s abusive father amidst a scarred lunar landscape, the feeling of terror, terror like when he witnesses what he does to this man in that scarred lunar landscape, the man approaching him, an ax in Antonio’s hand, and occasionally one does want, reading, for Antonio to do something actually reprehensible, for most of the things that Antonio does do that are quote-unquote reprehensible (paying for sex, being baffled at being a father, contemplating leaving his family) are actually quite hensible, because his paying for sex hurts no one, he comes across as a very loving father, and leaving his family looks for him like living in an apartment that adjoins the very apartment in which his family lives, plus staying there three nights a week, but this is really my only complaint, for there is nothing saintly about Antonio except his almost religious desire to understand at the same time as he erases or tries to erase certain memories even as he tries to regain them, this desire to make some sense of what has happened to his family, what has happened to his life, all the while portrayed so elegiacally, shot through with mercurial beauty and enormous stylistic ambition in this novel, Aphasia, the life of a writer’s mind.
Nathan Knapp’s criticism has previously appeared in The TLS, Tin House, The Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere, including this publication. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Banner image: “Bogotá Graffiti,” by Hernán García Crespo. Reproduced under a CC BY 2.0 license.