False War

Cuban writer Álvarez (The Fallen) constructs a mesmerizing novel out of vignettes featuring characters who left Castro’s Cuba only to experience more dispossession and indignity. It begins with a character known as the Adolescent who makes his way from Mexico City to Miami, where a childhood acquaintance puts him up in a crowded apartment of quirky roommates. The narrative is organized in sections ranging from a few lines to several pages, many of which have provocative headings (“Sewer Rats,” “Intimate Love Letters,” “A Tasteless Joke”). Among their subjects are the misadventures of Barber, who learned to cut hair in a refugee camp and now puts his shop in Miami at risk by getting caught up with a group of petty thieves. Elsewhere, an unnamed dissident moves to Berlin on the dime of a human rights organization and quickly becomes disenchanted with Germany and its resistance to immigrants, especially refugees from Syria. Some stories come secondhand, like that of the Nimzowitsch Drifter, a onetime chess player in underground Havana gambling dens whose ill-fated raft voyage from Cuba Barber learns about from a client. The teeming cast is tacitly connected by a writer named False War, who tells a friend in Miami that he’s imagining an amorphous book featuring “lots of characters, interlocking stories.” The prose throughout is heartbreaking and incisive in its depiction of exile (“You don’t belong to a place until you despise it”; “hatred became a traveling practice”). It’s a challenging and deeply satisfying work. Agent: Paula Canal, Indent Literary. (Nov.)