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
International Praise For A Zero-Sum Game
· Shortlisted for the PREMIO LAS AMÉRICAS, (for Debut Novel), given by the Festival de la Palabra from Puerto Rico to the best Spanish-language book of the year
· Selected among the 10 best books of the year by Nadal Suau, Periódico ABC (SPAIN)
· Selected among the 6 best books of the year by the literary blog, La medicina de Tongoy (SPAIN)
· Selected among the 10 best books of the year by Sergio González Rodríguez, Periódico Reforma (MÉXICO)
“A Zero-Sum Game is an outstanding political fantasy. Eduardo Rabasa has written a futuristic novel set in the present; its inventiveness is not based on new technologies but rather on new kinds of relationships. It’s a novel about the most complicated of extreme sports: cohabitation.”
—JUAN VILLORO, author of God is Round and The Guilty
“An amazing novel. On reading it, I felt myself to be immersed in a world that, as in certain works by Bolaño, transcends the characteristics typically associated with the Latin American novel. A Zero-Sum Game carries readers to regions of the imagination which subtly suggest the best of the Central European tradition. The sensation is as real as it is unsettling and, somehow, after a time, gives rise to an awareness of where we actually are. The prose rests firmly on a set of coordinates that can only be Mexican, revealing a totality of truths that reflect the complex texture of a country and a society immersed in a moment of violent convulsion. Few recent novels have managed to surprise me so greatly as A Zero-Sum Game.”
—EDUARDO LAGO, author of Call me Brooklyn
“The comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four are inevitable (…) However, A Zero-Sum Game is closer to A Brave New World than to the Orwellian dystopia.”
—VICTOR PARKAS, El País
“Meticulous, written with a harsh language, this is the portrait of a suffocating microcosm in which hierarchies are fixed by the illusion of a social progress that will never arrive. Rabasa dismantles with precision the mechanisms of a false democracy, in which no political alternation is possible (…) A mirror of some Latin American countries, this dense novel offers a pertinent reflection about the ways in which a regime can exercise violence today: less by outright repression and more through it’s capacity of imposing a deadly lethargy on people.”
—ARIANE SINGER, Le Monde
“This is an important novel. In terms of narrative, what the literary critics might call the central theme—power, our relationship with power, the power of power—is very deftly handled, and is combined with stories that interweave in perfect harmony. Rabasa’s decision to set the novel in an insignificant place, which works as a mirror to anywhere in the world, was a very wise one; more wise still is the satirical tone which reveals itself in his functional prose (that is, prose that functions well). Nowhere in recent times have I read a better portrait of how things are shaped – or how those things, over time, shape us.”
—JUAN BONILLA, author of Prohibido entrar sin pantalones, awarded the first PREMIO BIENAL DE NOVELA MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
“[Rabasa’s] first novel, A Zero-Sum Game, collects outbursts of passionate love, of the conflicting relationship between a father and a son, and, above all, of a critique to democracy in the shape of political satire…Rabasa gives an unexpected turn to the genre of novels of social criticism, a literary tradition from which the author hopes to obtain the formula that allows him to think and understand the present…A demolishing piece of work, perfectly suited for Rabasa, an eternal restless soul, and one who invites to share in the pleasure of literature from his double role as a publisher and writer.”
—LEONARDO TARIFEÑO, Revista Vice
“Rabasa’s satirical vocation is cristallized in a cumulative effect that at times recalls the transversal cut with which Georges Perec sketched the life of the tenants of a building in La Vie mode d’employ, or the eagle-eye with which Damián Tabarovsky followed the comings and goings of a leaf that glides over a street of Buenos Aires in his novel-essay Una belleza vulgar.”
—GUILLERMO NÚÑEZ, Frente
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501C3
nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.
© Eduardo Rabasa 2014
First published in Spanish as La suma de los ceros in 2014 by Surplus Ediciones, Mexico City, Mexico
English translation copyright © 2016 by Christina MacSweeney
First edition, 2016
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-941920-39-8 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016945227
The publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce the following extracts: