The Revolutionaries Try Again

Starred review from May 23, 2016
Cardenas’s exuberant, cacophonous debut novel profiles a group of Ecuadorans trying, some harder than others, to change the political situation in their country. Occasionally taxing but always stimulating, the novel is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the country’s strong-arm oligarchs, populist rabble-rousers, intellectual elite, and suffering workers. The primary character is Antonio, a Stanford graduate from the Ecuadoran town of Guayaquil who hasn’t returned to his native country since leaving 12 years earlier. When an old friend calls him from Ecuador during a period of political upheaval, Antonio, motivated by guilt, nostalgia, and the image of himself “on a white horse returning to solve the problems of transportation, alimentation, lack of sustenation,” agrees. Though the characters are nominally concerned with the future of Ecuador, the book is really a journey into the past of Antonio and the gifted high school friends he left behind, a “mafia of nerdos” who demonstrate their affection through constant, often puerile banter. For some, youthful idealism has succumbed to toadyism or apathy; others, outraged by the country’s disastrous leadership, are earnestly engaged in “conscientizing the people.” The political action tends to take place on the periphery as Cardenas dizzyingly leaps from character to character, from street protests to swanky soirees, and from lengthy uninterrupted interior monologues to rapid-fire dialogues and freewheeling satirical radio programs, resulting in extended passages of brilliance. This inventive novel shares some of the revolutionary spirit of Ecuador’s ill-served people, who, as one character puts it, “want to trounce the same old narratives.”

July 1, 2016
Debut author Cardenas explores youthful idealism, friendship, and the legacy of corruption in this novel set in Ecuador.Leopoldo Hurtado calls his childhood friend Antonio in California and persuades him to return home to Ecuador after a 10-year absence. As classmates at the elite San Javier school, they'd believed themselves responsible for the country's future. Influenced by a radical priest who demanded "How are we to be Christians in a world of destitution and injustice?" they catechized the poor and visited the dying. But corruption and instability abound, and the immoral lifestyle of their rich classmate Julio holds an undeniable appeal. Antonio displays a weakness for expensive clothes he can't afford, leading to rumors at Stanford that he's a dictator's son. Will Leopoldo and Antonio run for office, saving Ecuador from corrupt oligarchs? Or will despair, and their own moral failings, prove too great? Connecting threads follow their poor former classmate Rolando who now runs a radio show, his girlfriend, Eva, and his sister, Alma, who embarks on a harrowing journey to the U.S. after Julio attempts to rape her. Cardenas leavens his material with sly humor and references to everything from Neruda and Julio Cortazar to ABBA and The Exorcist. The friends play a made-up game called Who's Most Pedantic? Leopoldo wonders if the Jesuits built rooms with high ceilings "so that when the time came for the old and the infirm to die the priests could direct them to the vast pointlessness of the lord above?" A statue of the Christ child weeps real tears. Writing sometimes in sentences that stretch for pages, sometimes in fragmented stream-of-consciousness, even briefly in Spanish, Cardenas displays an ambitious intelligence that eschews easy answers. His inclusive sympathy is balanced by an unsparing eye. By the end, Antonio questions his own motives for returning, asking himself "how are we to be humans in a world of destitution and injustice."A strong debut written with nuance and authority.

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September 15, 2016
Born in Ecuador, educated in California, and holding back none of his rapid-fire virtuosity, Cardenas delivers an ambitious debut novel that orbits around two groups of Ecuadorians: Antonio and Leopoldo, who advocate for the working poor but struggle to resist the temptations of bourgeois life, and Rolando, Eva, and Alma, all of whom attempt, at least superficially, to reconcile their country's complicated legacy of corruption and cronyism with hope for a better future. Cardenas brilliantly transforms his book of ideas into an unraveling interrogation into Antonio's past, employing unorthodox paragraph structures that slip seamlessly between long passages of fast-paced stream-of-consciousness, unexpected song lyrics, and sudden dialogue. His idiosyncratic interspersing of Spanish words and phrases into the text invents a new subgenre of language, a notch between English and Spanglish. Compared to Julio Cortazar for his unrestrained experimentation, Cardenas should be read against his Spanish-language contemporaries, especially Horacio Castellanos Moya's Revulsion (2016), Alejandro Zambra's Multiple Choice (2016), and Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth (2015). A challenging, exhilarating debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)