Ornamental

The lives of a doctor, his wife, and his patient collide, laying bare the political and personal narratives they have carefully constructed for themselves.

A doctor recruits volunteers for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. Among them is “number 4,” who becomes emotionally involved with first the scientist, then his wife, a well-known visual artist in the midst of a creative crisis. The scientist is oblivious to the atrocities his new drug will bring to the city; his wife is oblivious to the superfluousness of the objects she has committed her life to exhibiting in galleries and museums. Number 4’s presence pierces the couple’s complacency, gradually undoing the many certainties they’ve accumulated in their lives of ease.

Publication date: June 2, 2020 

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.75

Page count: 144 pages 

ISBN: 9781566895804

Translated from the Spanish

Juan Cárdenas (1978) is a Colombian art critic, curator, translator, and author of the novels Zumbido (451 Editores, 2010; Periférica, 2017), Los estratos (Periférica, 2013), Ornamento (Periférica, 2015), Tú y yo, una novelita rusa (Cajón de sastre, 2016) and El diablo de las provincias (Periférica, 2017). He is also the author of the short story collection Carreras delictivas (451 Editores, 2008). He has translated the works of such writers as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Gordon Lish, David Ohle, J. M. Machado de Assis, and Eça de Queirós. In 2014, his novel Los estratos received the Otras Voces Otros Ámbitos Prize. In May 2017, he was named one of the thirty-nine best Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine by the Hay Festival in Bogotá. Cárdenas currently coordinates the masters program in creative writing at the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogotá, where he works as a professor and researcher.

Lizzie Davis is a translator and a writer. Her recent projects include Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize); Elena Medel’s The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Aura García-Junco.

Finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Award

“With pitch-black comedy, Ornamental, nimbly translated by Lizzie Davis, channels the ways that egomaniacs in science and art—in any field—rise to the top, up the pyramid of capitalism. . . . [T]he rhythm of Cárdenas’s writing compels and reassures, as if driven by the very humanity the lab has helped suppress.”

—Nathan Scott McNamara, The New York Times

“A supremely talented and original writer. . . . Cardenas’s surreal examination of addiction and compulsion is a unique and necessary contribution to the conversation.”

—Julianne Pachico, The Guardian

“Brilliantly executed and cleverly translated, Ornamental leaves us with a fresh understanding of the creation of art and the nature of meaning-making.”

—Dashiel Carrera, Los Angeles Review of Books

“[T]hrilling. . . . [E]xpertly translated by seasoned editor Lizzie Davis.”

—Ellie Simon, World Literature Today

“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'. . . . the overall effect offers both thrills and chills.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[An] absurdist critique of class inequality.”

—Kirkus

“[A]n exhilarating, slippery narrative where the reader knows much truth can be found, if only they can figure out how to decipher it.”

—Gillian Esquivia-Cohen, Kenyon Review

“A pointed critique of late capitalism incarnated in today’s manipulative pharmaceutical industry, of rapid modernization in postcolonial contexts, and of facile arts.”

—Sevinç Türkkan, Hopscotch Translation

“Juan Cárdenas is masterful in his rendering of dreamy dreams, in his evocation of workplace psychology, in his urge to keep shifting the structure of his narrative even while he consistently delivers a prose so energetic, restless, and particular that its astonishing poetic qualities don’t give us any pause.”

—Forrest Gander

"In this disquieting dystopia, impeccably translated by Lizzie Davis, the prose of Juan Cárdenas surpasses the beauty promised by the sinister drug of happiness. A very subtle, smart book indeed.”

—Alia Trabucco Zerán

“Perhaps the most damning fictional portrait of late capitalism I have ever read, at once absurd and startlingly relevant, Ornamental is a subtle and beautifully written nightmare.”

—Brian Evenson