Synopses & Reviews
"Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one
night years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that
followed."
The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to
get at the complete meaning of the day's events, the narrator must
first take us on an international tour — from the docks of Buenos Aires,
to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the
narrator's transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information
left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to
reconstruct Felix's stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures
up the hotel's labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager,
and the city's public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions.
Each character carries within them a secret that they don't quite
understand — a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a
wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the
sky. The Incompletes is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge,
haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just
outside our reach.
Review
"Sergio Chejfec's
The Incompletes is a masterfully nested narrative where
writing--its presence on the page, its course through time, its
prismatic dispersion of meaning--is the true protagonist. Heather
Cleary's flawless translation adds yet another layer to this
extraordinary palimpsest of a novel." Hernan Diaz
Review
"In a just world Sergio Chejfec would be on the lips of the most thoughtful and curious readers;
The Incompletes straddles the line between fiction and
travelogue, philosophy and dreams. The novel delves into memory, place,
and the mysteries we can never know about ourselves. Beautifully
translated, the story has not left my mind since I closed the book." Mark Haber
Review
"Just like you must accept dream logic when you're sleeping, you must accept
The Incompletes for what it is, to allow the endless descriptions
of rooms, city streets, broken televisions, the cold, peeling walls and
dirty window panes, to take hold of you. In the end you'll stumble out
of the book, a bit dazed, wondering what the hell you just read, but
it's an enjoyable trek if you like beautiful sentences." NPR
About the Author
Sergio Chejfec, originally from Argentina, has published
numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Among his grants and
prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri
Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. He
currently teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish Program at NYU. His
novels,
The Planets (a finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in fiction),
The Dark, and
My Two Worlds, are also available from Open Letter in English translation.
Heather Cleary's translations include Roque Larraquy's
Comemadre, César Rendueles's
Sociophobia, Sergio Chejfec's
The Planets and
The Dark, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo's poetry for New Directions.