False War

‘The dissidents, migrants and exiles of False War travel the world in search of some kind of refuge, but the cities they arrive in are places of purgatory, allegorical waystations of the permanently displaced, where everyone is an outsider, caught between landfalls, hurrying nowhere: “Brightness inside, darkness outside – until we crash.” This is a timeless and urgent work, in turns lyrical, hardboiled, tender, fragmented. It maps a way forward for the twenty-first century novel.’
— Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women

‘What happens when exile becomes style, and style becomes a kind of home? False War is that question asked with tenderness, fury and precision.’
— Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral

‘A new Latin American literature is here: With precocious mastery of a paragon of narrative resources and an overwhelming sensibility, Carlos Manuel Álvarez portrays the only identity that truly matters – not the national one, but the human one.’
— Emiliano Monge, author of What Goes Unsaid

‘How do we recount the story of migration? Where does it begin and where does the journey end? Can a story have as a protagonist the very act of migrating due to exile or dissidence? In his new novel False War, Carlos Manuel Álvarez does exactly that: he puts the act of fleeing at the center, and does so through characters that find themselves in the midst of a radical transfer.... Time in this novel passes in a space that hasn't yet been occupied – an impasse of open possibilities and discovery.’
 — Julieta Venegas, Gatopardo

‘Álvarez paints this generational tapestry with lush and colorful prose that is exuberant and rich, with brushstrokes of infinite tenderness, occasional violence, humour tinged with nostalgia, and critique towards a society that squashed the dreams of its residents in its attempt to reach the goal of utopia. The pages that take place in Mexico City and Berlin can serve as a clear example of how we find ourselves with an uncommon narrator, capable of speaking in his own voice about the eternal topics of loss and exile.’
— Juan Cervera, Rockdelux

‘In False War, defeat is like an ocean that connects stories from different narrators in different parts of the globe that all converge in the present, forming an archipelago in which the collective trauma of loss ends up emerging not as a national singularity but as a sign of the times, one of the scars of humanity today.’
— Nelson Cárdenas, Revista UNAM

Natasha Wimmer is a translator of contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction from Spanish to English. She spent four formative years in Spain as a child and concentrated in Romance Languages and Literature as an undergraduate at Harvard University. She is a regular visiting lecturer at Princeton University and Columbia University, and she has written reviews and criticism for The Believer, the New York Times and The Nation, among other publications. She is the recipient of an NEA Translation Grant, a PEN Translation Award and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.