Читать книгу A Zero-Sum Game - Eduardo Rabasa - Страница 2

What Max noted was the inverse: despite its hyper-realistic pretensions, political narrative was acquiring an increasingly fictitious character. The point of departure and the end met to close a circle that no longer even bothered to take into account some of the most manifest features of any attempt to explain the social sphere. In years gone by, the graybeard who signaled the disenchantment of the world proposed setting out from “what is” as it presents itself, even as a point of departure for those who wanted to transform reality. In present times, the reverse process was followed: to set out from a list of indisputably good desires, and to assume that—with sufficient will on the part of those with power—one could reach a just Utopia where everyone would stay in the place corresponding to him.

“Villa Miserias is, of course, a microcosm, but Rabasa’s novel is anything but your simple society-in-miniature story. It’s an emphatically political novel, and willing to embrace theory, rather than just practice: there’s a discourse-framework here—some telling, rather than just showing—but Rabasa has a few tricks up his sleeve in this respect as well, and A Zero-Sum Game is decidedly (and for the most part successful as) an elaborately constructed fiction…A very impressive piece of work, in particular also in its creative approach to the concept of ‘political fiction,’ and in suggesting what fiction can still do.”

—MICHAEL ORTHOFER, The Complete Review

“When I heard that Deep Vellum were publishing this translation, I was ecstatic. Rabasa comes with much praise. Channeling both Orwell and Ballard, his dizzying and intricate dystopia exposes the demagoguery and inequality, the individualism and false democracy of the way we live now. A Zero-Sum Game is not only a brilliant novel—it’s the novel we need right now.”

—GARY PERRY, bookseller, Foyles Bookshop (London, England)

“How can a satirical farce be so dourly realistic? How can a precise and theoretical evisceration of neoliberal democracy also have such bloody guts and viscerally real characters? How did Eduardo Rabasa manage to make such a personal account of an individual’s crack-up into an anatomical sketch of political deadlock we find ourselves trapped in? And how did he make it so funny? Don’t answer these questions: just read the book.”

—AARON BADY, The New Inquiry