The characters in Fake War are shipwrecked on dry land, stranded in a no man's zone. Some want to leave Cuba and cannot, others left and never quite arrived. They live in a kind of limbo, in a perpetual impasse between reality and desire, between the past and the future, between the country of origin and the country of destination, waiting for a promise, a confirmation or, quite simply, a truce. Something that keeps reminding them that life is possible.

What is the difference between an immigrant, an exile and a refugee? Doomed to chaos, anguish or boredom, the perennially displaced are besieged by a world that at every step –in that simulacrum of progress towards the mirage of the consumer society– reminds them that there is no place for them. In this choral novel, the characters seem to move with nomadic self-confidence between Cuba, the United States, Mexico, France or Germany, although all of them are paralyzed, immersed in a false war that is waged by virtue of no true passion, no authentic idea.

With an atomized structure that brilliantly reflects the disintegration caused by uprooting, and a narration full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy, Falsa Guerra is an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the inescapable voices of his generation, a memorable and moving account of the lost steps to nowhere imposed by exile.