TURING’S DELIRIUM

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR TURING’S DELIRIUM

“The National Security Agency near Washington intercepts two million messages an hour, Edmundo Paz Soldán tells us in his information-mad sixth novel (and the second to be translated into English), ‘but it was increasingly difficult to decode them.’ That same problem seems to afflict the characters in ‘Turing's Delirium.’ ‘I can't even read my own notes without wondering if I'm trying to send myself a secret message while doing everything possible not to be deciphered by myself,’ says one cryptanalyst to two colleagues. Welcome, in short, to a wildly overloaded meta-universe of code breakers lost in a Pynchonic grid of 1's and 0's and a state of increasingly dizzying paranoia...” - New York Times

“Set in the fictitious Bolivian city of Río Fugitivo (like the author’s earlier The Matter of Desire), his second novel translated into English intersects the lives of seven characters, all of whom are connected to the Black Chamber, the secret decoding government agency... The translation admirably conveys the lingo of cybertalk and chat-room transcripts.” - Library Journal

“If I put before you the phrase, ‘Latin American revolutionaries,’ the images most likely to flicker in your mind are of guerrillas in threadbare camouflage, rifles slung over their shoulders as they move silently through the rainforest. There will be a village, harsh words spoken, actions taken that leave it unclear who the good guys are and who the bad. Well, you can hold onto that last bit, but dispense with the rest before you enter the real and virtual worlds of Latin American cryptographers and cryptoanalysts and computer hackers and crackers doing battle in Bolivia in Edmundo Paz Soldán's Turing's Delirium, in an English translation by Lisa Carter.” - CreativeLoafing.com

“As I've noted here before, good mysteries and thrillers can illuminate places we knew very little about going in. The South American country of Bolivia is one of those places: Wisps of the comings and goings of military dictators and democratic leaders have filtered through the ozone, but it takes Turing's Delirium, a beautifully written (and impeccably translated) thriller by Bolivia's leading novelist, to open a window on what its citizens are thinking, feeling and hoping for.” - Chicago Tribune

“From Bolivian author Paz Soldán (The Matter of Desire, 2004, etc.), a dark political thriller with a technological edginess that admirably merges complex literary characters and a fast-paced, interwoven plot... The clean, uncomplicated prose and intricately mapped minds of its many players should satisfy readers of the low and high alike. An adventure with realpolitiks at its center.” - A Starred Kirkus Review

“Paz Soldán’s textured novel (winner of Bolivia’s National Book Award in 2002) is an engrossing depiction both of his nation’s 20th-century political history and of the 21st century’s confrontation with accelerating global hegemony and the conundrum (attention, cyberpunk fans) of virtual terror attacks.” - A Starred Publisher’s Weekly Review