“All American abduction stories are alike,” declares Aura, formerly a professor of Latin American literature and now one of the dozens of people abducted⎯ snatched, caged, shipped away⎯ over the course of this novel (for lack of a better word), in which every brief chapter features a miniature tragedy of separation, violent and heartbreaking, and yet each also offers some kind of talking cure, some gab-fest, though rarely face to face, rather via phone or chatbot, and in this way every brief chapter spins the core atrocity in a kaleidoscope, and the widening circle of shattered survivors all prove Aura wrong, their pieces fall into fresh combination of shapes and colors, a different look, and no one ever lacks for a wisecrack, either, boy can they talk (or type), until every brief chapter becomes a conversational fractal that unfolds like this sentence: one long, strange run-on.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s Aphasia is titled after a musical composition by Mark Applebaum. The piece, first performed in 2010 by Applebaum himself after four months of fastidious rehearsal Cárdenas saw it live was originally conceived for singer and two-channel tape.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas on Transcribing Life Into His Novel,
Aphasia
December 14, 2020
Es que a mí me duele, I heard the interviewee say, pausing the audio recording of the interviewee so I could fix the awkward grimace I imagine others see whenever I cry in public in my own so-called fiction I skirt the verb to sob because of its melodramatic acoustics, Antonio writes in
Aphasia, nevertheless to weep aloud with convulsive gasping was what I did and although I had already spent many Sunday afternoons listening to audio recordings of interviews with Colombians displaced by violence for a Voice of Witness oral history project, this is the moment I like to believe has had an influence on my novels, the moment the voice of the interviewee can no longer bear to recount how her son had been murdered so she cries and tells the interviewers that it hurts, a statement that I was supposed to be transcribing so I rewinded the audio recording and heard her say what she said before she said