Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s second novel is a hugely rewarding, polyphonic narrative of migration from Cuba. Through its characters’ rich and eccentric interior worlds, it gives articulation to people whose lives are often reduced to stereotypes and offers a new vision of migration.
False War is comprised mostly of 13 interconnected storylines, which alternate irregularly in short episodes. The stories have different timelines and vary significantly in their portrayals of an array of characters, many from Havana, “a city of many stray sadnesses”.
The novel is also broken up at the midpoint by two “Interludes”. In the second of these, an “exile” who has just come home “doesn’t understand yet what kind of plot his return has planted in him”. This line resonates across the novel’s dense, fragmented narrative. Characters struggle to understand the trajectories of their lives, the currents they are moving with or against, the plots they’ve fallen into or that have been “planted” in them. The line also speaks to the novel’s structure more generally, as connections between the stories and their sometimes overlapping characters emerge slowly and unexpectedly, combining genre modes and confounding conventions of plot.
False War doesn’t dwell on dangerous passages, precarious border crossings, struggles of integration, or detention (though one character briefly recalls his harrowing incarceration at Guantánamo Bay). It certainly doesn’t diminish the many violences inflicted on migrants, but is nevertheless eager to move away from stereotypical scenes. Instead, Álvarez is interested in the meandering thoughts of his characters as they drift around Miami Beach or the outer zones of Havana, and in tracking their impulses, desires, obsessions and the idiosyncratic stories they share with each other.
The novel specialises in evocative accounts of the unspectacular – from the opening imagery of the “primordial gas stations of America”, to a man entertaining himself in a doctor’s office by sardonically reading a travel magazine article on “how to choose the best cruise ship experience”. There are moments of violence and loss, but they are often muted by layers of storytelling. In fact, the power of the novel derives from its depictions of a kind of stuckness that is less related to geography than to the psychological borders that separate people, and to failures of communication.
False War’s interest in the ostensibly ordinary lives of its characters extends to unheralded places - or at least the idea of them. Though the journeys its characters have made or plan to make are generally from Havana to Miami, often via Mexico City (with episodes in New York, Berlin and Paris, too), it is quick to remind us that “none of these places are far-off”. Indeed, as “the exile” poignantly notes, the “real far-flung place is the rural village, this little piece of land in the middle of nowhere. There’s no proof of its existence, and therefore it is truly extraordinary to be here, where his sister never got to leave, and where, by extension, she never was.”
The novel of interlocking stories is not a new thing, but Álvarez’s narrative is multiply fragmented. Its strands include several distinct first-person narratives, close and distant third person, and second person address. Their temporalities shift, and some strands even have distinct genres; one is autofictional and another noirish, for instance. Nevertheless, a coherence emerges through the autofictional strand, which shares its title with the novel. Late on, its narrator reflects on the nature of the book he is writing and stories he is trying to tell: “the coherence of this splintered emotional grammar could only be maintained on the page, as text, with me as the magnet unable to attract all the fragments to myself and therefore going where the fragments happened to be”.
Though this illuminates the organisational logic of False War by naming its ostensible centre, the book remains capacious, irreducible and resistant to national allegory. The interconnected stories of its often-floundering individuals are never meant to add up to a coherent story of the struggle of a people. Yet a loose sense of shared experience does come into view through oblique metaphors. In one late scene, a woman called Elis, who appears in four story strands, walks into her closet at the end of a long day and falls asleep standing up. When her partner arrives home with their children, she stays still and hidden, for reasons she doesn’t entirely understand. This is typical of the novel’s use of metaphor. Elis isn’t sure why she has gone into the closet, “has no way of justifying why she was there”, but decides to stay, “to see how it all ended up”.
It is easy to imagine many of the novel’s characters in this situation: seeking temporary sanctuary, unsure of what is to come, and unable to decode their own actions. False War is a rich and capacious novel that has much to say about our contemporary moment.
• False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez is published by Fitzcarraldo (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
