“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. (...) the rhythm of Cárdenas’s writing compels and reassures, as if driven by the very humanity the lab has helped suppress.”

“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.”

“Juan Cárdenas explores the ideologies that colonize our minds today in Ornamental, a captivating novel that suggests capitalism is now our one true faith. (...) The result is an exhilarating, slippery narrative where the reader knows much truth can be found, if only they can figure out how to decipher it. (...) Cárdenas’s prose is economical yet lyrical; many of his images are veritable objets d’art. (...) perhaps art such as Ornamental can help the reader recognize the ways our minds are colonized. Perhaps it can help us begin to challenge the icons to which we have been made to pray.”

“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.”

“Cárdenas has one of the sharpest and most precise prose of the current Spanish-speaking literature. His prose knows how to move out seconds from a bare surgery of the sexual baroque into the extreme contention of the unchained poetry in spite of preserving some restraint. The irony used to describe the mechanisms of neocapitalism is simply brutal.”

“A novel of high density – in terms of ideas, plot, language – Ornamento is the confirmation that Juan Cárdenas is one of the most interesting writers in the Spanish language today.”

“Juan Cárdenas has conceived a maddeningly delightful, genuinely literary novel.”

“Ornamento is a novel dense in ideas, witty in its style (with such brilliant formulas as the reference to a “baroque of drug barons”) and close to the prophetic in its denouncing speech.”

“In this story Cárdenas manages once again to describe a Latin American stage in detail without mentioning places or countries: just the attitudes and accents of its characters.”

“In his thrilling novel Ornamental, Colombian art critic, translator, curator, and renowned author Juan Cárdenas masterfully tells the tale of the junction of an experimenting doctor, his wife, and his subsidized voluntary narcotic patient (...) with prose that is relentlessly dynamic and picturesque.”

“This blow-me-over novel, set in a post-narco-baroque Colombia that could be anywhere, begins with a medical study of women committed to ingesting, in exchange for payment, an experimental and addictive recreational drug. Their dreams go strange, serving as a kind of litmus which registers lurid abscesses in a class-and-youth-obsessed society and in what we mistook to be the women’s ordinary lives. Soon, prophetic graffiti appears on walls around the city. 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—someone ‘threatening pain with extortion,’ someone ‘signing imagined telegrams of dried monkey meat,’ the night recovering, at last, ‘its vulgarity’—don’t give us any pause. ”

“In one constrained view, Ornamental is about the modern visages that exploitation and inequality can take. Cardenas’s narrative style hangs on outlines and sketches that give the short novel an allegorical heft surprising for its slimness. (...) It’s in the unexpected reversal of focus, from the researcher to number 4, from the moneyed to the impoverished, that Ornamental commits its boldest act and reminds us of the people sacrificed and ignored by the progress of science.”

“This is the first of Cárdenas’s novels to be translated into English, with hopefully more to come, as he’s a supremely talented and original writer. (...) Drugs will sadly always be associated with Colombia, but Cardenas’s surreal examination of addiction and compulsion is a unique and necessary contribution to the conversation.”