Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2016
296 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Extravagant, absurd, and self-aware, The Revolutionaries Try Again plays out against the lost decade of Ecuador's austerity and the stymied idealism of three childhood friends - an expat, a bureaucrat, and a playwright - who are as sure about the evils of dictatorship as they are unsure of everything else, including each other.
Everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio's manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn't read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.
"Starred Review. This inventive novel shares some of the revolutionary spirit of Ecuador's ill-served people, who, as one character puts it, 'want to trounce the same old narratives.'" - Publishers Weekly
"A strong debut written with nuance and authority." - Kirkus
"He's a tremendously skilled storyteller and monologuist; his writing is so exuberant." - Paul Yamazaki
"Mauro Javier Cardenas has taken the edifice of arch modernism and suffused it with tender details of a boyhood in Ecuador. The long, unraveling sentences reveal an extraordinarily musical ear. This is a debut that will last." - Karan Mahajan
"The Revolutionaries Try Again is a daring novel that pits youthful idealism against persistent and inescapable corruption. Mauro Javier Cardenas is an exciting new voice in Latin American literature, and his debut crackles with an exuberance that readers of Valeria Luiselli, Julio Cortázar, and Horacio Castellanos Moya will love." - Stephen Sparks
"Beware of this writer! The book you're holding bites. If the reader dares enter after this warning, he'll never forget it, and the memory will stay just as sharp as the humor and velocity in the stories themselves. Incisive, forceful, and written in an English that's fiercely subversive" - Carmen Boullosa
This information about The Revolutionaries Try Again was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mauro Javier Cardenas grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in Economics from Stanford University. Excerpts from his first novel, >i?The Revolutionaries Try Again, have appeared in Conjunctions, The Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, and BOMB. His interviews and essays on/with László Krasznahorkai, Javier Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Antonio Lobo Antunes have appeared in Music & Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and The Quarterly Conversation.
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