False War
Dizzying, dreamlike ... 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 ... A mood all its own: playful, irreverent, sardonic — and angry.
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The stories of these untethered lives are broken apart, admixed, and rearranged, often asynchronously, in an attempt to approximate the fragmentation that results from seeing your ties to your homeland erased or made meaningless ... I don’t know that I have any clear answers about Álvarez’s novel, but do know that it is likely to endure and be built upon by whatever he writes next because, unlike so many of his fictional characters, he cannot stop thinking about his voluntary exile and the paradise that he left behind.
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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 ... The novel specialises in evocative accounts of the unspectacular ... The book remains capacious, irreducible and resistant to national allegory.
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