04/13/2020
A powerfully intoxicating drug is at the center of Cárdenas’s atmospheric, nightmarish English-language debut. Somewhere in Colombia, on an estate near a major city, a doctor observes the drug’s effects on four women “from the inferior classes.” In the process, he grows fascinated with a woman known as number 4, who is unique in her response to the drug—while numbers 1, 2, and 3 sleep or become sexually aroused, 4 speaks in “fantastically deformed discourses,” including an apparent memory of her mother, disfigured by plastic surgery, and a political speech involving “the Ministry of Destitution.” Meanwhile, the doctor’s relationship with his wife, a cocaine-addicted artist, stagnates while she prepares for a new show of her work. In spare and economical prose, Cárdenas sketches a highly stratified world, where drugs link high society and neighborhoods that are “a single crush of old houses and ruins.” Cárdenas is less interested in plot than juxtaposing the contradictory philosophies of the wealthy, elitist doctor; his artist wife, who believes in “the mysticism of grace”; and the intelligent and damaged Number 4, who insists on “the authentic grace of people like me, who outfit themselves in everyone else’s debris.” Still, the overall effect offers both thrills and chills. (June)
Longlisted for the 2021 PEN Translation Award
“With pitch-black comedy, Ornamental, nimbly translated by Lizzie Davis, channels the ways that egomaniacs in science and art—in any field—rise to the top, up the pyramid of capitalism. . . . [T]he rhythm of Cárdenas’s writing compels and reassures, as if driven by the very humanity the lab has helped suppress.” —Nathan Scott McNamara, New York Times
“[A] work of subtlety and restraint. . . . What makes Ornamental so deeply affecting, however, is not that its pages come together to form a beautiful work of exterior art—though it does—but its ability to cast unease on our interior worlds. . . . Brilliantly executed and cleverly translated, Ornamental leaves us with a fresh understanding of the creation of art and the nature of meaning-making.” —Dashiel Carrera, Los Angeles Review of Books
“In his thrilling novel Ornamental, Colombian art critic, translator, curator, and renowned author Juan Cárdenas masterfully tells the tale of the junction of an experimenting doctor, his wife, and his subsidized voluntary narcotic patient. . . . [E]xpertly translated by seasoned editor Lizzie Davis.” —Ellie Simon, World Literature Today
“In spare and economical prose, Cárdenas sketches a highly stratified world, where drugs link high society and neighborhoods that are ‘a single crush of old houses and ruins’. . . . the overall effect offers both thrills and chills.” —Publishers Weekly
“[An] absurdist critique of class inequality. . . . Cárdenas also dabbles in art criticism and curation and uses that knowledge to acidic effect in a social drama that borders on the phantasmagorical. . . . with captivating moments.” —Kirkus
“[A]n exhilarating, slippery narrative where the reader knows much truth can be found, if only they can figure out how to decipher it. . . .Cárdenas’s prose is economical yet lyrical; many of his images are veritable objets d’art. . . . Lizzie Davis has done a spectacular job rendering Cárdenas’s novel in English.” —Gillian Esquivia-Cohen, Kenyon Review
“Cárdenas’s narrative style hangs on outlines and sketches that give the short novel an allegorical heft surprising for its slimness. . . .It’s in the unexpected reversal of focus, from the researcher to Number 4, from the moneyed to the impoverished, that Ornamental commits its boldest act and reminds us of the people sacrificed and ignored by the progress of science.” —Sebastian Sarti, Cleveland Review of Books
“This blow-me-over novel, set in a post-narco-baroque Colombia that could be anywhere, begins with a medical study of women committed to ingesting, in exchange for payment, an experimental and addictive recreational drug. Their dreams go strange, serving as a kind of litmus which registers lurid abscesses in a class-and-youth-obsessed society and in what we mistook to be the women’s ordinary lives. Soon, prophetic graffiti appears on walls around the city. Juan Cárdenas is masterful in his rendering of dreamy dreams, in his evocation of workplace psychology, in his urge to keep shifting the structure of his narrative even while he consistently delivers a prose so energetic, restless, and particular that its astonishing poetic qualities—someone ‘threatening pain with extortion,’ someone ‘signing imagined telegrams of dried monkey meat,’ the night recovering, at last, ‘its vulgarity’—don’t give us any pause. And translator Lizzie Davis is the next generation’s Natasha Wimmer, one of our most rewarding and savvy translators from the Spanish.” —Forrest Gander
“In this disquieting dystopia, impeccably translated by Lizzie Davis, the prose of Juan Cárdenas surpasses the beauty promised by the sinister drug of happiness. A very subtle, smart book indeed.”—Alia Trabucco Zerán
“Ornamento is a novel dense in ideas, witty in its style, and close to the prophetic in its condemnatory speech.” —Nadal Suau, El Cultural
“A novel of high density—in terms of ideas, plot, and language—Ornamento is the confirmation that Juan Cárdenas is one of the most interesting writers working in the Spanish language today.” —Daniel Saldaña París, Tierra Adentro
“Juan Cárdenas has conceived a maddeningly delightful, genuinely literary novel.” —José de María Romero, Revista de Letras
“The novels of Juan Cárdenas suggest that at times we can come close to understanding the terror of history.” —Edmundo Paz Soldán, El boomeran(g)
“The lyricism and the democratic polyphonies that constitute some of the best Latin American literature are present here. Juan Cárdenas’s prose couldn’t be further from predictable literary language.” —Marta Sanz, El confidencial
“With this story, Cárdenas achieves, once again, a detailed description of the Latin American scene, not by mentioning the places or countries, but by way of the accents and attitudes of his characters.” —Verónica Figueroa, El País
“The atmosphere of the novel goes ratcheting up its sense of unease by degrees, echoed by the dogs, whose initial unsettling barks become the terrifying howls of beasts in chains.” —Teresa Lezcano, Sur
“The works of Juan Cárdenas are disturbing and provocative.” —Catalina Holguín Jaramillo, Revista Arcadia
2020-05-04
A doctor works to develop an addictive drug for women in this absurdist critique of class inequality.
In addition to having written a half-dozen novels, Colombian author Cárdenas also dabbles in art criticism and curation and uses that knowledge to acidic effect in a social drama that borders on the phantasmagorical. In a laboratory based in a remote forest somewhere outside an unnamed city, a doctor works diligently to test a new drug on four underprivileged women. Designated simply as numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, the women experience radically different trips on this new drug, which enhances both perception and libido. The most interesting to the doctor is 4’s stream-of-consciousness “discourses” involving her mother and a vision of a dystopian future, which might be simply senseless, drug-induced inventions or vital memories of a life that came before. Parallel to the doctor’s fascination with his patient is his volatile relationship with his cocaine-addicted wife, a prosperous visual artist who’s extremely anxious about her imminent exhibition of new work. There’s not much of a cohesive storyline here—the doctor is clearly infatuated with 4, as is his wife, with whom the doctor shares a penchant for sexual experimentation and, later, a relationship of sorts with his patient. That said, the narrative mainly serves as a construct through which Cárdenas can muse upon society’s unheard voices, the clash between those with the artist’s inherent privilege and people with lives more like single mother 4, and the interplay between the ideologies held by those disparate classes. Its progression is equally strange—Cárdenas devotes one segment entirely to one of 4’s dreamy reveries and another to the doctor’s dreams and nightmares, but occasionally he interrupts these relatively conventional passages with the revelation that the doctor’s new security guards are spider monkeys. Altogether it’s quite uneven but with captivating moments.
An archetypal and oddly curious slice of magical realism.
