Juan Cárdenas

Introduction by Catherine Lacey

Translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis

A hallucinatory frontier novel about the uneasy alliance between art and empire, from one of the most lauded voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

In 1850, amid rising political tensions, the Republic of New Granada commissions an expedition to document its land and people. Among its members are Manuel Ancízar, whose book Pilgrimage of Alpha will help invent Colombia’s myth of itself, and English painter Henry Price, who hopes only to adequately depict the glaciers and jungles he sees—and, by night, to murmur his clumsy Wordsworth translations to the botanist with whom he shares a tent. When Price encounters the paintings of a reclusive local artist, his faith in his own vision begins to falter.

Nearly two centuries later, a writer reads Ancízar while looking out on the violence and ecological devastation of the present. As he lets his mind stray in “irresponsible fantasy,” he enacts and reenacts the historical drama of seeing, continually shuffling symbols: jungle, river, plains; dandy, madman, lover; machete, captive, king.

Disrupting history with a botanist’s eye for detail and an art critic’s sensitivity for visual language, Cárdenas constructs a novel like a nineteenth-century diorama, in which the subtlest shift in light can dramatically alter a scene. By the National Book Award–nominated author and translator of The Devil of the Provinces, Pilgrimage of Alpha—as precise as an optical illusion and as vertiginous as a dream—asks what we think we’re seeing when we look at the Americas.