Aphasia : a novel
(Book)

Antonio works making spreadsheets for Bank of America, but not-so-secretly wants to be a great writer-or indeed to do anything that will help him avoid thinking about his sister, a paranoid schizophrenic on the run from the police. Antonio's attempts to write a novel become an ekphrastic performance of avoidance and evasion, darting between the past and the present to consider relationships erotic and familial, the worlds of architecture and literature, and how these languages might affect our lives. Antonio's sister is on the run. After threatening to shoot her neighbours and claiming that Antonio, Obama and the Pentagon are conspiring against her, she's disappeared. Antonio, however, is doing his best to think of anything but his sister or, for that matter, any of his problems, for fear of destabilising the precarious middle-class existence he's built in America with his family. Turning his back on his present-day woes, Antonio submerges himself in the past, transcribing recordings of his mother speaking about her troubled life in Colombia; his ex-wife speaking about her life in the Czech Republic; writing furiously about the past relationships that still haunt him.