Mauro Javier Cárdenas: “Aphasia”

Mauro Javier Cárdenas discusses reimagining narrative possibilities with his new book, “Aphasia,” and its syntax centered around the performative impulses of his sentences. Its long sentences maneuver between places, time, and characters, and Cárdenas says he wants to explore fresh forms that can replace obstacles in outmoded structures; he says novelistic conventions no longer work for him, and conventional narratives do not represent the world he feels himself experiencing. He is a writer of originality who makes the English language sound like music.

Excerpt from “Aphasia” by Mauro Javier Cárdenas.

WHEN ANTONIO WAS ARTURO

instead leaves him to die on his yacht, the internet reports, a companion with a history of not phoning the paramedics in similar circumstances and whom the internet executive met through a website called Your Sugar Arrangements, which is how Antonio first heard of Your Sugar Arrangements: what in the world is this website, Antonio remembers thinking, and since he doesn’t inject himself with heroin and can’t isolate himself dangerously inside a yacht — I have no interest in yachts, Antonio writes, or people who frequent yachts — on one of his first evenings alone on summer #8, as he was waiting for a stool at Salt Air, he angled his phone so no one could see him browsing a site called Your Sugar Arrangements (YSA), typing Arturo Ventanas as his username and joining this website out of curiosity, he told himself, not expecting to become a Sugar Daddy (SD) to any Sugar Baby (SB), as advertised on the website, nor expecting to become another successful male looking to fuel mutually beneficial, no-strings-attached (NSA) relationships with beautiful young women, as also advertised on the website, although financially he’d done okay enough to maybe belong to the Practical designation in the SB allowance section called Expectation / Budget ($1,000 to $3,000 monthly), as opposed to the High (more than $10,000 monthly), although he selected Negotiable (openly negotiable to any amount) because in the past he’d experienced bouts of nihilist spending (mostly on clothes from Saint Laurent) so he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of throwing away his database analyst salary on these new types of arrangements.

Excerpted from Aphasia © 2020 Mauro Javier Cárdenas. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.