Forget Nostalgia: The Exiles in This Dreamlike Novel Are Angry

FALSE WAR, by Carlos Manuel Álvarez; translated by Natasha Wimmer

“Much of the exile’s life,” the Palestinian American critic Edward Said once observed, “is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule.” He thought this might explain the curious fact that so many exiles play chess — or write novels. The exile lands in a new, “unnatural” world, he wrote, and discovers that “its unreality resembles fiction.”

A chess player and a novelist are among the many exiles who populate “False War,” the dizzying, dreamlike second novel by the Cuban writer Carlos Manuel Álvarez. His debut, “The Fallen,” which was translated into English in 2020, depicted a contemporary Cuba divided between an older generation of revolutionary idealists and a younger one disillusioned by poverty and repression. “False War” takes place elsewhere — Miami, New York, Mexico City, Berlin — and follows the drifting paths of those who have left the island. (Some two million Cubans are believed to have emigrated since 2021, roughly eight times the number who did so in the four years after the revolution.)

If the life of an exile is said to be disorienting and disjointed, Álvarez seems determined to approximate such an experience for his reader. “False War” has dozens of characters, many of whom are either unnamed or go by different names at different moments. Their stories are told in jumbled fragments that ricochet between past and present, dream and reality.

To name just a few: There’s a barber named Barber, who fled Cuba by boat in the late 1970s and settled in Hialeah, Fla., where he watched AIDS decimate his community; a chess player detained at Guantánamo who spends his days striking up games with the guards; a man who came to Miami after his fiancée died in an earthquake in Mexico City, and who’s now writing a kaleidoscopic novel in which he hopes to describe an “exile without nostalgia.”

I’ve read “False War” twice now, and I confess that I’m still not entirely able to keep all these people straight. But this is surely by design: One of the pleasures of the novel is how it turns you around, blurs the edges of things, plays tricks on your memory. Another is its elegant, compressed style. You could no sooner summarize it than an Ashbery poem:

Outside, a dark green taxi suddenly zigzags and flips over in the middle of the street. On his white bedsheet, half-asleep, Freddy Olmos is neither ugly nor beautiful. In his dream a group of people he knows cross themselves and plunge into the sea.

These exiles experience life as something shapeless, entropic; they’ve learned to treat every intimacy as fleeting. “I had the feeling we were drawn on a piece of paper and the corner of the paper had been set on fire,” one character reflects — a surprisingly apt description of what it’s like to read this book.

But what surprises me most, strangely, is the novel’s mood. Globalization has given us at least two types of migration novels: those about diaspora, which are sometimes prone to a pious sense of longing, and those about professional-class Western expatriates, which are plagued by a tedious cosmopolitan anomie. “False War,” in this translation by Natasha Wimmer, has elements of both, but a mood all its own: playful, irreverent, sardonic — and angry.

Its anger is reserved both for “the rain of misfortune that keeps falling on the defenseless heads of Havanans,” and for the fundamental precariousness of immigrant life in America, where no matter how hard you work, eventually “something’s going to happen. Somebody sideswipes you on the Palmetto, there’s a strange charge on your card, the price of gas goes up, the new president has it out for you.” Álvarez has written a novel about searching for a home in a world ruled by force. And this, finally, is what he has to say: “You don’t belong to a place until you despise it.”

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