Ornamental

April 13, 2020
A powerfully intoxicating drug is at the center of Cárdenas’s atmospheric, nightmarish English-language debut. Somewhere in Colombia, on an estate near a major city, a doctor observes the drug’s effects on four women “from the inferior classes.” In the process, he grows fascinated with a woman known as number 4, who is unique in her response to the drug—while numbers 1, 2, and 3 sleep or become sexually aroused, 4 speaks in “fantastically deformed discourses,” including an apparent memory of her mother, disfigured by plastic surgery, and a political speech involving “the Ministry of Destitution.” Meanwhile, the doctor’s relationship with his wife, a cocaine-addicted artist, stagnates while she prepares for a new show of her work. In spare and economical prose, Cárdenas sketches a highly stratified world, where drugs link high society and neighborhoods that are “a single crush of old houses and ruins.” Cárdenas is less interested in plot than juxtaposing the contradictory philosophies of the wealthy, elitist doctor; his artist wife, who believes in “the mysticism of grace”; and the intelligent and damaged Number 4, who insists on “the authentic grace of people like me, who outfit themselves in everyone else’s debris.” Still, the overall effect offers both thrills and chills.

May 15, 2020
A doctor works to develop an addictive drug for women in this absurdist critique of class inequality. In addition to having written a half-dozen novels, Colombian author C�rdenas also dabbles in art criticism and curation and uses that knowledge to acidic effect in a social drama that borders on the phantasmagorical. In a laboratory based in a remote forest somewhere outside an unnamed city, a doctor works diligently to test a new drug on four underprivileged women. Designated simply as numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, the women experience radically different trips on this new drug, which enhances both perception and libido. The most interesting to the doctor is 4's stream-of-consciousness "discourses" involving her mother and a vision of a dystopian future, which might be simply senseless, drug-induced inventions or vital memories of a life that came before. Parallel to the doctor's fascination with his patient is his volatile relationship with his cocaine-addicted wife, a prosperous visual artist who's extremely anxious about her imminent exhibition of new work. There's not much of a cohesive storyline here--the doctor is clearly infatuated with 4, as is his wife, with whom the doctor shares a penchant for sexual experimentation and, later, a relationship of sorts with his patient. That said, the narrative mainly serves as a construct through which C�rdenas can muse upon society's unheard voices, the clash between those with the artist's inherent privilege and people with lives more like single mother 4, and the interplay between the ideologies held by those disparate classes. Its progression is equally strange--C�rdenas devotes one segment entirely to one of 4's dreamy reveries and another to the doctor's dreams and nightmares, but occasionally he interrupts these relatively conventional passages with the revelation that the doctor's new security guards are spider monkeys. Altogether it's quite uneven but with captivating moments. An archetypal and oddly curious slice of magical realism.

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