Falsa guerra

The characters in False War are shipwrecked on dry land, stranded in a no-man's-land. Some want to leave Cuba and cannot, others left and never quite arrived. They live in a kind of limbo, in a perpetual impasse between reality and desire, between past and future, between the country of origin and the country of destination, waiting for a promise, a confirmation or, simply and simply, a truce. Something that keeps reminding them that life is possible. What is the difference between an immigrant, an exile and a refugee? Doomed to chaos, anguish or boredom, the perennially displaced are besieged by a world that at every step -in this simulation of progress towards the mirage of the consumer society- reminds them that there is no place for them. In this choral novel, the characters seem to move with nomadic self-confidence between Cuba, the United States, Mexico, France or Germany, although all of them are paralyzed, immersed in a false war that is fought by virtue of no true passion, no authentic idea. With an atomized structure that brilliantly reflects the disintegration caused by uprooting, and a narrative full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy, Falsa Guerra is an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the inescapable voices of his generation, a memorable and moving account of the lost steps to nowhere imposed by exile.