Villa Miserias is a suburb of a suburb where everyone knows their place and nothing ever changes. Every two years elections are held for the presidency of the residents' committee, and every two years there are no surprises. But the balance begins to shift with the arrival of Selon Perdumes and his theory of Quietism in Motion. With his alabaster smile, he uncovers the deepest secrets of the unwary residents, and transforms their fantasies in reality with the help of the loans he offers them. Growing rich from money-lending, Perdumes gradually becomes the spectral power behind the community. But when Max Michels, sunk in an obsessive relationship with the beautiful, black-eyed Nelly, and, struggling to silence the multiple dissenting voices in his head, decides to run for president without Perdumes' permission, the battle lines are drawn.
"During exigent times, some writers offer up a good story: they divert us with entertainment. Fewer others insist that there might be something important to say and that it might be worthwhile to try to say it. Their art is fiction but its dimensions are expansive. Genet, Orwell, Dostoyevsky. The wit gets under our muscles, the resonances linger. Rabasa is a writer of the second kind. A Zero-Sum Game might be a lacerating cri de coeur from just up the street. It's a Mexican novel of rage and inspiration, heroes and villains, quiet desperation and lurching insights. It all takes place in a neighborhood that looks a lot like our own."
"Rich with the absurdity and excess of human folly, A Zero-Sum Game is a satire bursting with invention. Eduardo Rabasa displays the keen eye of a Huxley or a Vonnegut, mocking our obsession with progress, our endless consumerism and our desire for utopia. Villa Miserias could be a stand-in for any city in any country in the world. Hilarious and original, Rabasa's debut is pure joy and the introduction of an exciting new voice."
A Zero-Sum Game is a universal story, a biting satire of a contemporary consumer society and the cult of the individual, written with the vicious precision of Swift and Orwell, liberally sprinkled with biting humor and chilling realism. Debut novelist Eduardo Rabasa, named one of the Hay Festival's México20 list of the greatest young Mexican writers, focuses a clear, steady authorial gaze upon the sophistry and rationalization that mask the actual situation in which, for all the choices we are offered, we have little power over our destinies, caught in the paradox of empowerment and impotence that is neoliberal society and the democratic state.
"Outstanding political fantasy. Eduardo Rabasa has written a futuristic novel set in the present; its inventiveness is not based on new technologies but rather on new kinds of relationships."
A hilarious satire and universal exploration of the origins of power and corruption. A Zero-Sum Game uses the highly-charged election for the presidency of a residents' committee and the influence of a powerful stranger to both expose those in power and to sympathize with individuals who find themselves caught in the paradox of empowerment and impotence that is modern consumer society and the democratic state.
Eduardo Rabasa is the founding editorial director of Sexto Piso, Mexico's most prominent independent publishing house, and was selected to the Hay Festival's México20 list of the greatest Mexican authors under the age of forty.
