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A Novel
by Zachary Lazar
A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico.
Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that "words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time." He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, "a rural nowhere…that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language."
In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to "reinvent herself as the kind of person she'd been before" the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell's former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika's incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana's exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of "home" vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.
"Lazar's latest novel...is anything but a downer. His brand of introspection is page-turning, informed by his hip sensibility, musical way with language, and sensuality. As deep a dive as Lazar takes into one man's alienation—from himself as well as the world around him—the book soars with timely truth. An engrossing statement of where we are, told through the eyes of a reluctant survivor." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A stream of consciousness tour de force...Lazar's stirring, multilayered, and beautifully written novel will strike a chord with all readers." - Booklist (starred review)
"Christopher's narrative tics, such as an aversion to certain specific details...can feel cloying, but the account of his and Ana's struggles to maintain their relationship through adversity and upheaval are fascinating. In the end, Lazar perfectly orchestrates a symphony of frustration, empathy, fear, and hope into a thoughtful and timely tale." - Publishers Weekly
"No one can write like Lazar, with his particular style of courage and ferocity. I inhaled in two sittings this sexy, mystical romance, which takes place just before the pandemic, as the world swerves toward disaster. Elegy, love story, reckoning, tale of hope and renewal: it is brilliant." - Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
"A politically deft and emotionally devastating exploration of what it means to live in exile. With great lyricism and sly wit, Lazar illuminates the many varieties of longing for home." - Jenny Offill, author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation
"Zachary Lazar is a master of moments lesser writers gloss over. His characters are intensely human, intriguing, and inviting. Readers will relish the feeling that they are observing secret lives." - Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow
This information about The Apartment on Calle Uruguay was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Zachary Lazar is the author of five previous books, including the novel Sway, the memoir Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder, and the novel I Pity the Poor Immigrant, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the 2015 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for "a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence." Lazar lives in New Orleans, where he is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University.
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