Lost in The Un-Funhouse: American Abductions Is Coming to a Detention Center Near You

The Nazis targeted people they considered non-Aryans, not just my Jewish ancestors. These included LGBTQIA+ people, non-Whites, those with physical and mental health challenges, the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, critics of the regime, and artists whose works were deemed “degenerate.”

In Mauro Javier Cardenas’ American Abductions (Dalkey Archive Press, 2024), Pale Americans, led by a Racist-in-Chief, kidnap and deport untold numbers of Latin Americans, whether they are undocumented, possess work permits, or are naturalized citizens. 

But the characters in this not-so-futuristic tale are not current immigrants, largely from Central and South America, who are fleeing persecution, crime, poverty, and climate change. Rather, they are the artistic and intellectual elite of emigres. 

The main character, Antonio Rodriguez, is a novelist deported to Bogota, Columbia, for interviewing the American relatives of previously exiled Columbians, giving him the paradoxical “opportunity” to meet the exiles in person. This mirror effect is the central metaphor of the novel, as represented by artist Leonara Carrington’s “Labyrinth” on the book’s cover, because there is no escaping the trauma shared by deportees and the families left behind, who are themselves subject to capture and exile at any moment. 

That Carrington was born and raised in English high society, yet adopted Mexico as her humble abode, reinforces the unstated theme that all Americans were immigrants (if not indentured servants and enslaved people) at one time or another, except Pale Americans suffer from amnesia and believe that their American birthright is original and God-given. 

Carrington was also a writer with an equally “surrealist” imagination, for whom dream and reality are often interchangeable. Carrington experienced a psychotic break and spent time in an asylum after the Nazis detained her lover, Max Ernst, for his “degenerate” art. As children, Antonio’s daughters, Ada, an architect, and Eva, a conceptual artist, adopted Carrington’s fabulous stories as if she were their literary mascot. And Ada names the computer in her car “Leonara.” 

However, the comfort she derives from this digital relationship is short-lived when she learns from Eva, who has moved to Bogota “voluntarily,” that their father has suffered a heart attack and dies soon after, leaving them an indeterminate legacy, not unlike that of all Americans with dual loyalties to their original and adopted homes. They demonstrate resilience by continuing their father’s work. 

Survivor’s guilt is especially common among the American-born Latinos in the novel and makes the grief they experience “complicated” in a clinical sense, as shared by the daughters during an online support group facilitated by a Dr. Sueno (Spanish for “dream”) with the children of other exiles, who adopt as their aliases, to evade the thought police, the names of many Latinx artists and writers. 

Mixed with the intrigues of the surveillance state, as if George Orwell’s 1984 has been augmented by artificial intelligence, and the visceral descriptions of a dozen characters’ brutal abductions and detentions, the novel takes the form of a collective stream of consciousness, in which each of the 38 short chapters consists of one run-on sentence. 

Because it is often hard to distinguish who among the many characters is talking and who is listening, Cardenas suggests that there is strength in numbers when avoiding eavesdropping by White supremacists. Or the names and stories may change but there is an underlying similarity to their experiences that can be summed up as well-founded, existential paranoia. 

Cardenas’ novel takes the form of simulated digital code and algorithms filled with so many cultural allusions that they are impossible to follow, even though the reader can Google many of them. Given that this and the author’s many narrative loose ends provoke maddening frustration at times, it’s as if the multiple storytellers and their audiences are attempting to throw off course the immigration “idiots” in charge of their fates. 

Much as James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first major English modernist novel to employ a stream of consciousness, has given rise to multiple tomes of interpretation, some enterprising doctoral students will create an exegesis of American Abductions for the ages. 

However, this reviewer, one of Fountain House’s CORE peer specialists, is more interested in how creative storytelling heals psychic wounds and gives hope to all of us caught in the maelstrom of the current political “mishigas” (Yiddish for “craziness”), during which recent immigrants have been elevated to the top of the list of “enemies” by a once and future Racist-in-Chief. 

Carl Blumenthal has a master’s degree in comparative literature and has been an arts critic for 50 years, mainly with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.