Chaos, a Fable

A breathtaking novella about faith and anarchy by the acclaimed and prizewinning Latin American writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa.

Mexican author Rubirosa is attending a book fair in Tangier when he reconnects with an old acquaintance, a Moroccan artist who asks one favor of his visiting friend: to access the puzzling files on a memory card. It could help fulfill the destiny of his son Abdelkrim. It could also unwittingly draw both men into irreversible events already in motion on distant shores.

In America, Abdelkrim, a brilliant aspiring astronaut deemed “too Muslim” for citizenship, has teamed up with an equally gifted young prodigy, a witness to the plight of Syrian refugees. Together, the foreign students share a vision of altering the world’s geopolitical landscape to end human suffering with a nearly inconceivable blueprint. And they can turn theory to reality. They can bring about change. But only through a technological apocalypse can there be redemption―by unleashing total chaos.

A provocative morality tale that moves with the visceral rhythms of a high-tech thriller, Chaos, A Fable is a spare and stunning triumph from one of the most celebrated Latin American authors of his generation.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala in 1958. He immigrated to New York in 1980, and in 1982 he moved to Morocco. American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, with whom Rey Rosa had been corresponding, translated his first three books into English. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths indigenous to Latin America and North Africa. Of his many works, seven have been translated into English: The Beggar’s Knife, Dust on Her Tongue, The Pelcari Project, The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Severina, and now Chaos, A Fable. He currently lives in Guatemala City.

Jeffrey Gray, a professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, is the English translator of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novels The African Shore (Yale University Press, 2014) and Chaos, A Fable. He is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2005), as well as many articles on literature and American culture. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlantic, the Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, and other periodicals. He is a coeditor (with Ann Keniston) of The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology (McFarland, 2013). He was born in Seattle, Washington, and has lived in Asia, the South Pacific, Europe, and Latin America.