By Jay Innis Murray
In his 2021 interview with Dustin Illingworth, Mauro Javier Cárdenas teases and waves at the influence of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape on his then work-in-progress. It’s a delightful back and forth that shows off how Cárdenas thinks about fiction, long sentences, and the influences upon him of authors who came before him. Here is the link to the interview.
https://obstructivefictions.substack.com/p/interview-1-mauro-javier-crdenas
American Abductions is a great and important book. This third novel by Mauro Javier Cárdenas is stylish. It has amazing sentences. It presents a plausible and, thus, terrifying vision of America’s near future. Cárdenas ranges widely. He delivers everything from Dad jokes and amusing family squabbles to plentiful literary allusions and guilt-drawn nightmares of the deportation of Latin Americans. It is funny, rage-inducing, and devastating.
I see fictional form as a technology. Few novels could draw this out for me better than American Abductions, a novel that explores the entanglement of thinking and talking with technology. Many of the book’s fragmented monologues or dialogues rely on technologies of communication, recording and surveillance. Some of these are tools used by ordinary people to tell their stories of migration (or in the case of major character, Antonio, to collect them), to say what their families were like when they were together, and what they thought and how they talked about what they thought after they were forcibly separated. Other tools are used by the Racist in Chief and his sadistic US state to track the people (often based on nothing beyond the origins of their surnames) who they relentlessly pursue for deportation. As everyone knows, the thing about technology is it improves over time. In the near future of American Abductions, the sinister tech that exists today (that we know about) is ramped up and made vast and hyper-efficient. Likewise, the form Cárdenas uses has existed in a simpler iteration. If you look back to Krapp’s Last Tape, you can see Beckett using it in a miniature, closed form. I’d argue that Cárdenas has expanded Beckett’s invention and opened it up to bring in dozens of voices and, with them, more of the world.
Krapp’s Last Tape needs no introduction. Samuel Beckett’s one-man play first staged in 1958 is one of the great literary fragments of the twentieth century. The play is peopled by an old man named Krapp and the voices of younger versions of himself played back to him and the audience by tape-recorder. Krapp has a birthday tradition of recording monologues, playing back the previous versions of himself, and recording new thoughts on those past versions and on his life. I described the play above as closed, because Krapp is alone. The location is his den, his own limited world. On a past birthday when he went to a winehouse to celebrate, he was the only soul there. This work is about this man. It does not reach out to the world.
The pattern of Krapp’s Last Tape is interruption. It stops and starts. It has pauses for coughs, stage directions, and commentary. As a short work of imaginative literature, it is a swerve away from a Joyce’s perfect short story “The Dead” with its controlled weaving of events in a straightforward, linear style. Krapp does what any literary or nostalgic person would do with their hands on the spools of the past. He winds the tape forward past the moments he does not want to hear, and he rewinds and replays his favorites. Along the way, he hits the pause button and laughs at himself or broods over past chances of happiness lost.
For example:
Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway. (Pause.) The eyes she had! (Broods, realizes he is recording silence, switches off, broods. Finally.) Everything there, everything, all the–(Realizing this is not being recorded, switches on.) Everything there, everything on this old muckball, all the light and dark and famine and feasting of . . . (hesitates) . . . the ages!
In the filmed performance (on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otpEwEVFKLc&t=132s) Patrick Magee tallies every imaginable affect, doing much with his face, but following Beckett’s form.
So, now I come to Antonio’s project, which is the heart of American Abductions. Antonio José Rodriguez is a Colombian-born writer and a Prudential Investments database analyst in San Francisco who is deported to Bogotá, despite being an American citizen and committing no crime. He is separated from his two school-age daughters, Ada and Eva. After his deportation, he begins a project of “hundreds of interviews with Latin American deportees he conducted throughout the world.” Ada and Eva inherit the tapes after Antonio dies in Colombia.
Antonio’s tapes are an archive and an oral history of twenty-first century family separations. In the same way that Beckett’s form and material cohere perfectly in his play, here Cárdenas marries the real and the surreal to create a startling work of literary art. The novel begins with Antonio’s own family, giving glimpses of his life before his deportation. In every sense, his own story is the first chapter of his project. At the open of the novel, Antonio’s abduction (deportation) has already occurred. His daughters Ada and Eva listen to the recordings of Antonio’s interviews. Like Krapp with his spools, they know the content of these interviews, and they skip or rewind & replay parts they want or need to hear.
I think a reading of one chapter of the novel will give a sense of the book and its form. Here is the opening of the chapter “Elsi’s Nephew,” which begins Part II.
I thought the abductor was calling to say my time had come, Elsi says, my time has come, I would say to myself whenever my device transmitted its ridiculous ringtone, which ringtone, Antonio says, what is love / baby don’t hurt me / no more, Elsi says, laughing, and here Eva rewinds her father’s interview with Elsi so she can hear him laugh too. (page 39)
Most of the stories in American Abductions have multiple layers like this simple passage. There is obviously the mediation of the recording, and Eva’s manipulation of it via technology, but there is also Antonio’s interruption of what starts off seeming like a first-person monologue but is actually a conversation. Eva’s rewinding is a direct callback to Krapp, a sneaky moment of pathos in this chapter. I say sneaky, because this chapter is a tour de force. It is just six pages long, but in form and effectiveness it is one of the best things I have read in years.
After some more banter and conversation unrelated to Elsi’s nephew, Antonio calls Elsi back to the story she has begun and is bravely determined to tell. The humorous nature of the volleys hides or masks the revelations Elsi knows are coming for Antonio and for us, the readers. Elsi clarifies the conversation with Jonathan Smith who has called her and who likely works for ICE or an adjacent agency of the government.
Jonathan Smith said we’ve captured your nephew, Elsi says, no, what Jonathan Smith said, I swear I remember his every word, profe, he said I am calling to inform you we’re in possession of a child who claims to be your nephew, but I didn’t tell him I had forgotten about my nephew, or that it had been months since my sister had called me and said she wanted to send her son Felipe across the border before he was shot or kidnapped in San Salvador can you imagine if I had changed my number due to a wireless switch your line for free special, for instance, you didn’t talk to your sister again after she called you about Felipe, Antonio says, I love my sister, Elsi says, of course, Antonio says, I love my sister and I know that’s what I’m supposed to say because she’s my sister, Elsi says, but I say I love her because I do love her, even though she was taken away by the American abductors when I was still little… (page 41)
Elsi corrects herself on the language Jonathan Smith used, and she shines light on the cruelty of the American deportation project. “We’re in possession of a child” is a cold, bureaucratic way of describing Felipe’s capture. It is consistent with the thinking that migrants are other than humans. It is consistent with a speech made by Donald Trump just two months ago. I said, “No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.” (Trump speech in Michigan, April 2, 2024). Later chapters have stories of unbelievably aggressive cruelty on the parts of American abductors.
Elsi continues.
or perhaps I was expecting my sister to call me to tell me [Felipe] was on his way, but she didn’t call me and months went by and then one day Jonathan Smith dialed ten permutations at most and said a child who claims to be your nephew, a child who claims his name is Felipe Arteaga and that you are his aunt, and here Eva hears Elsi crying and tries to imagine what his father might be thinking because he doesn’t say anything to console her — what could I have said to console her, Eva? that the world isn’t what it is? — although he does soften his voice when he, after a minute and thirty two seconds, according to the program streaming this recording through the console above Eva’s bed, asks her what she studied in college, algebraic topology, Elsi says… (page 42)
Here we have a complicated thread of voices. Elsi describes events but also her version of the context of the events (I was expecting my sister to call me). Eva hears Elsi crying on the tape and this is further mediated by the text of the novel to the reader. We get Eva’s on-the-fly attempt to keep up with the moment emotionally by trying to imagine her father’s thinking. We get an interjection of Antonio’s (imagined or ghost-spoken?) questions to Eva (what could I have said to console her) and then a move to distance as Eva notes (and a third-person narrator tells us about) the timer on the console above her bed. As an attempt to depict how thinking and narration can be entangled with technology in these late days of ours, I think this succeeds. I also believe it shows how Cárdenas intensifies and expands Beckett’s example.
Soon, we learn that the sinister methods of the abductors approach a surreal level of sophistication. Perhaps the combo of tactics and tools already exists. It’s terrifying enough.
so Jonathan Smith called me and my first thought was, because by then there were already reports about the abductors hiring data science vendors who would merge data from our devices with transactional data amassed by former NSA employees to locate their deportation targets, my first thought was the abductors know my location, Elsi says, I think by then they were already running probabilistic models borrowed from epidemiology to create all sorts of data linkages, Antonio says, I remember thinking if they know my phone number, Elsi says, the abductors can type it into their database, match it with a device ID, and query the coordinates of my device, so you switched off location services, Antonio says, yes but I knew they probably already had my location history so they could simply query the last twelve months and narrow down their target location to the coordinates with the most activity, so you gave your number to your sister before the abductors began to amass this kind of data, Antonio says, yes, Elsi says, and yes, by the time Jonathan Smith called me there were already reports that the American abductors were trying to meet their aggressive quota of deportables by capturing people when they appeared at the detention centers to claim their family members (page 43)
The end of the chapter is astounding. I will quote it at length since it shows what Cárdenas can do with form and how efficient he can be with story.
how old was Felipe, Antonio says, he must have been seven or eight years old, Elsi says, okay, Antonio says, do you have children, Elsi says, two daughters, Antonio says, what are their names, Elsi says, and here Eva pauses the recording and considers fast forwarding it because she knows this part by heart — play it one more time, okay? — Ada and Eva, Antonio says, do you remember them at seven or eight years old, Elsi says, I remember when Ada was eight and Eva was five we attended a dance performance where a gaunt woman who looked like a ghost stumbled around while a sad looking man in a black suit opened a path for her by casting aside the chairs on the stage, Café Muller by Pina Bausch, Elsi says, that’s it, Antonio says, and when we arrived at home that night Ada closed her eyes, extended her arms like a somnambulist, and pretended to be the gaunt ghost woman while Eva swatted Legos out of the way, Felipe, Elsi says, tell me about him, Antonio says, there’s not much to tell, Elsi says, I don’t know anything about him, okay, Antonio says, because I was scared they would detain me if I showed up to pick up my nephew so what I told Jonathan Smith, I hope you’re recording this, Elsi says, I am, Antonio says, because what I told Jonathan Smith is I don’t have a nephew, Elsi says, I don’t know any Felipe, you must have dialed the wrong number. (page 44)
So much happens here in just 250 words or so. The paragraph moves effortlessly from level to level. We have the conversation continuing between Antonio and Elsi. The talk on the tape activates Eva’s moral attention enough for her to pause the tape. I think we can wonder if her attention is simply waiting for the story that is about her childhood and her older sister. It’s a lovely story. She hesitates over the fast forward button. We also have to consider Eva wants to skip forward, because Elsi is about to reveal (and Eva knows this, she knows it by heart) how the existential choiceless choice given to her (Elsi) by Jonathan Smith is going to leave her (Elsi) with a moral catastrophe. Elsi denies her nephew. The chapter ends, but that is not the last we will hear from Elsi. I found myself searching for what to do with my emotions several times reading this book.
In this book of sometimes dreamlike quality, near the beginning of Part III, there’s a vision suggested by Auxilio, another of Cárdenas’ devastating voices. She asks that Antonio:
imagine a performance of Krapp’s Last Tape in which the tapes are audio files recorded on Krapp’s device that the audience can hear through headsets while seated in an area that resembles the data center of a surveillance agency… (page 97)
This is not precisely a description of American Abductions though it’s in the ballpark. I picture it, though, as Auxilio describes it, as an experience of art, like the reading of American Abductions, that can wake up the audience to a horror more real than surreal.
American Abductions is available now from Dalkey Archive Press.
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