Praise for The Invisible Years
“The incisive latest from Rodrigo Hasbún (Affections) finds a Bolivian American writer reconnecting with the estranged friend whose abortion as a teen inspired his novel in progress. In chapters alternating from their high-school years in the 1990s to the present day in Houston, Hasbún crafts striking set pieces . . . This one hits hard.” —Publishers Weekly
“If you didn’t know Bolivian literature is one of the finest of our day, you will after reading The Invisible Years. Hasbún has written a fun and tender book about the passing of time and the stories scars are made of, beautifully translated by the great Lily Meyer.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
“I met Rodrigo Hasbún many years ago at a literary festival in The Hague and he immediately caught my attention. He seemed to me an empathetic, imaginative and intelligent young man, like many writers from Latin America. I read his novels with passion. His prose is lucid, well-constructed, mature, with an obvious ethical and political foundation, but also the paranoid science of connecting the dots. A few years later I met him again by chance on the streets of Brussels, but there is no such thing as a coincidence.” —Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Solenoid
“Rodrigo Hasbún is a writer who knows how to lead the reader to walk along the ridge between what is true and what is not. Is it possible that the two forty-year-olds who meet in a bar in Houston are the same people who, more than twenty years earlier as teenagers in Bolivia, lived through those shocking, violent days of a March that changed their lives forever? Which life is the most real? The one transposed into memory, the one lived in the present, or the one that becomes a story? The Invisible Years, so tense and aching, places these doubts at the center of the novel.” —Andrea Bajani, author of The Book of Homes
“A formally ambitious novel tracing parallel narratives Bolivia and the U.S., alternating present and possibly fictionalized past . . . As the narrator and his old friend catch up, Hasbún generates tension from the way they refer to events we have yet to read about in the 1990s sections—including hints that something very bad is about to befall those characters. A heady exploration of memory and friendship—and the places where both can fray.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The Invisible Years is a poignant novel with a graceful translation by Lily Meyer, who manages the shifts in tone and syntax between time periods with ease.” —On the Seawall
Praise for Affections
"A slim, striking novel." —The New York Times Book Review
"Concise yet wild, haunting yet exuberantly full of life, Rodrigo Hasbún's Affections achieves all sorts of artful, intoxicating contradictions. What a gloriously unpredictable book." —Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear
"In Affections, a family elegy is woven into an epitaph for the radical politics of South America and the result is an act of literary hypnosis you won't soon forget." —Adam Haslett, bestselling author of Imagine Me Gone
“A dark, stunning novel, Affections is charged by a brilliant kaleidoscope of perspectives, the voices of exiles, a post-war German family in Bolivia. Hasbún has spun a tale of displacement, of political turmoil, in which the characters’ motives are as complicated as the Bolivian jungle they explore. It’s a fascinating book." —Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, A Comedy
“Dark, deep, disturbing. No concessions, no sweeteners: here everything hurts. Through this ably crafted family saga, Hasbún manages to explore the permanent conflicts and contradictions of a whole nation.” —Andrés Neuman, author of Travel of the Century
"A compact and evocative historical novel. . .Hasbun has crafted an intriguing tale that ably bridges a pair of indelible historical moments. Lots of novels plumb the intersection of the personal and the political, but few have this kind of intellectual helf and emotional subtlety." —World Literature in Review
"It's hard to decide which character is more fascinating in Hasbún's masterful blend of history and fiction about a German family living in La Paz in the decades after the war. As the quick-paced narrative covers from the search for a lost city in the Amazon to the brutal guerrillas in the Bolivian jungle, the inner lives of each family member build up to enormous emotional payoff. This is sharp storytelling, both in the political and intimate fronts." —Daniel Galera, author of Blood-Drenched Beard
"I have rarely read a novel so gently and quietly concerned with adding two and two and getting five, in fact, of making it possible to read the same sentence twice and see two different things. At first, I thought this was just because Hasbún is a very good writer—which he is—but it isn’t just that: to tell a story about a person is to freeze them in place, but to live the story that is told about you, to move forward in time from the image into which you were frozen, like a word being italicized—it does something to render that story a mere fiction, false and inadequate. And if telling stories is a form of control over reality—which it is—then living in a world made by stories is all about finding the places where the story doesn’t fit, where the lives we are sentenced to break apart and become something else. This novel is about that: Affections is not a story about lives, in the end; it’s about how people live in a world constructed by stories, how they make those stories, and how they are lost in them." —Aaron Bady, The New Inquiry
“Affections is a masterpiece, its spare mosaic narrative mesmerizes and brilliantly explodes in the reader's imagination like slow fireworks that will never fade. With its Chekovian emotional intimacy, the razor sharp and tragic political insight of a Coetzee or Bolaño, the seamless enchantment of a Dinesen tale, this novel feels timeless.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
"A short but powerful novel. . . rendered beautifully by translator Sophie Hughes." —Words Without Borders
"Hasbún writes with patience and precision, revealing the family’s most intimate thoughts and interactions: first smokes, blind love, and familial devotion. This is a novel to savor for its richness and grace and its historical and political scope."
—Booklist (starred review)
"Though Hasbún's narrative is rooted in politics, its key strengths are his remarkable command of time and characterization. The novel is short but gallops across a half-century's worth of transformations in Bolivia, and sections narrated by individual characters are marked by a surprising depth of emotional detail given the story's brevity. . . .In stripping down the story to its barest essence, Hasbún has intensified the effects of each individual scene; the volumes' worth of drama contained in the family's life emerge by suggestion and implication. A one-sitting tale of fragmented relationships with a broad scope, delivered with grace and power." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This is a finely atmospheric book...It’s a work of sympathetic imagination, written with cool economy, elegance and understanding. It’s a reconstruction of real lives, real historical events, but Hasbún’s achievement is to make it perfectly fictional, which is to say truer than fact. I read it straight through first, with no idea of its historical truth, no knowledge of Hans Ertl beyond the name, no memory of the woman who in Hamburg assassinated the Bolivian diplomat who had been the policeman who ordered the hands of the dead Che Guevara be cut off. Learning of this made the second reading interesting in a different way, but didn’t enrich it. The truth of fiction of this quality is that it reminds you how much of life that really matters goes on in the mind and heart." —The Scotsman (UK)
“Beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes, Affections is a richly atmospheric and evocative portrait of fractured familial bonds that takes the reader into the darkness where the protagonists dwell.” —The National (UK)
“Los afectos is a miracle of writing: Rodrigo Hasbún can concentrate two continents, fifty years of history and the collapse of a family in just one hundred pages. He works with extreme delicacy on the Erlts’ biography by creating a literary version of them which is wonderful for its consistency and clarity.” —Giorgio Fontana, Domenica - Sole 24 Ore (Italy)
“Hasbún never tricks the readers, but he surprises them, and displays his heroes with a sort of warm coldness which plays with our curiosity and lets us freely imagine what’s left unsaid.” —Goffredo Fofi, Internazionale (Italy)
"He is not a good writer, thank goodness. He is a great one." —Jonathan Safran Foer