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.โ He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, โa rural nowhereโฆthat sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.โย
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In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to โreinvent herself as the kind of person sheโd been beforeโ the world she knew disappeared.ย A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried historiesโfrom the death of Bellโs former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malikaโs incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Anaโs 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.
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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.