Ruben Reyes Jr.’s debut novel, Archive of Unknown Universes, arrives as a breathtaking fusion of historical fiction and speculative elements that challenges our understanding of fate, memory, and the weight of unspoken histories. Following his acclaimed short story collection There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Reyes Jr. demonstrates his evolution as a storyteller capable of weaving intimate human experiences with the broader tapestry of Central American history.
The novel operates across two primary timelines—2018 Cambridge and 1978-1980 El Salvador—connected by an experimental device called the Defractor, which allows users to glimpse alternate versions of their lives. This speculative element serves not as science fiction spectacle but as a profound metaphor for the immigrant experience of wondering “what if we had never left?”
The Architecture of Parallel Lives
The narrative centers on Ana and Luis, two Harvard students whose relationship fractures amid their search for family truths. Ana’s academic pursuit of her mother Felicia’s Salvadoran past intersects with Luis’s discovery of love letters belonging to his great-uncle Neto, a revolutionary who disappeared during the civil war. Through the Defractor’s revelations, they uncover the story of Neto and Rafael, two guerrilleros whose forbidden love unfolds against the backdrop of revolutionary struggle.
Reyes Jr.’s structural brilliance lies in how he mirrors the central couples across time periods. The contemporary relationship between Ana and Luis reflects the historical bond between Neto and Rafael, creating a literary palindrome where past and present illuminate each other. The Defractor becomes more than a plot device—it represents the diaspora’s eternal question of whether love and belonging might have been easier in an unchanged homeland.
The author’s handling of the speculative elements demonstrates remarkable restraint. Rather than drowning in technological explanations, the Defractor serves its thematic purpose: forcing characters to confront the gap between reality and possibility, between the lives they’ve inherited and the ones they might have chosen.
Love as Revolutionary Act
Perhaps the novel’s greatest achievement is its portrayal of love as both personal and political resistance. Neto and Rafael’s relationship exists in the shadows of revolutionary activism, where their love for each other must compete with their commitment to liberation. Their correspondence, revealed through a biblical cipher, creates some of the most achingly beautiful prose in contemporary literature.
The letters themselves become artifacts of resistance—not just against political oppression, but against the erasure of queer love from historical narrative. When Neto writes, “Remember that I loved the world, even when it hurt me. Remember that I loved you, even when I hurt you and you hurt me,” Reyes Jr. captures the dual nature of love as both sanctuary and vulnerability.
The contemporary thread explores love’s complications in a different context. Ana and Luis struggle with the weight of inherited trauma and the question of whether their relationship can survive the discovery of family secrets. Their journey through Cuba and El Salvador becomes a pilgrimage not just for historical truth, but for understanding whether love requires courage or simply persistence.
The Weight of Inherited Silence
Reyes Jr. excels in depicting how trauma travels across generations, manifesting in protective silences that ultimately isolate family members from each other. Felicia’s reluctance to discuss her past creates a gulf between mother and daughter that mirrors the broader experience of Central American families in the United States. The author avoids the trap of making trauma explanatory for all character behavior, instead showing how silence becomes its own form of inheritance.
The novel’s treatment of memory and history reflects Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of history as “a particular bundle of silences,” which serves as the book’s epigraph. Through the Defractor, characters access not just alternate timelines but alternate forms of memory—versions where secrets were shared, where departures didn’t happen, where love survived war.
Elena’s eventual revelation about her childhood during the war demonstrates Reyes Jr.’s understanding that breaking silence requires both courage and readiness from the listener. The timing of truth-telling becomes as crucial as the truth itself.
Literary Craftsmanship and Cultural Authenticity
The novel’s prose shifts skillfully between the academic precision of contemporary scenes and the lyrical intensity of historical sections. Reyes Jr.’s background as a son of Salvadoran immigrants informs every detail, from the cultural specificity of family dynamics to the political complexities of post-revolutionary El Salvador.
The author’s decision to include untranslated Spanish phrases and cultural references respects his bilingual readership while never alienating monolingual English speakers. This linguistic authenticity extends to the novel’s exploration of how trauma affects language itself—how certain experiences resist translation not just between languages but between generations.
The Defractor sequences are rendered with particular creativity, shifting between visual and textual presentations that mirror the technology’s interface while maintaining narrative flow. These sections avoid the pitfall of becoming mere exposition, instead serving as windows into character psychology and thematic development.
Minor Flaws in an Otherwise Stellar Work
While Archive of Unknown Universes succeeds brilliantly in most aspects, it occasionally suffers from pacing issues, particularly in the middle sections where the parallel narratives don’t always maintain equal momentum. Some readers may find the contemporary academic setting less compelling than the historical revolutionary context, though this imbalance serves the novel’s thematic purposes.
The ending, while emotionally satisfying, resolves perhaps too neatly for a novel that has spent significant time exploring the messiness of inherited trauma and historical memory. However, this critique speaks more to the richness of the world Reyes Jr. has created than to any fundamental flaw in execution.
A Necessary Voice in Contemporary Literature
Archive of Unknown Universes establishes Reyes Jr. as an essential voice in the growing canon of Central American-American literature. The novel succeeds in making the personal political without sacrificing intimate character development. It demonstrates how speculative elements can serve literary rather than genre purposes, creating space for exploring experiences that resist traditional narrative frameworks.
The book’s exploration of queerness within revolutionary contexts adds crucial complexity to our understanding of both LGBTQ+ history and Central American political movements. Neto and Rafael’s love story fills a significant gap in historical representation while avoiding both romanticization and tragedy porn.
Recommended Reading
Readers drawn to Archive of Unknown Universes might also appreciate:
- The Murmur of Bees by SofÃa Segovia – for its blend of magical realism and historical fiction
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot DÃaz – for its exploration of diaspora and inherited trauma
- Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera – for its meditation on border crossing and transformation
- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka – for its innovative treatment of political violence and memory
- Exit West by Mohsin Hamid – for its speculative approach to migration and displacement
Final Verdict
Archive of Unknown Universes announces Ruben Reyes Jr. as a major talent capable of bridging literary traditions while creating something entirely new. The novel succeeds as both an intimate love story and a sweeping historical epic, demonstrating how personal relationships intersect with political movements across time and space. While not without minor flaws, it represents a significant achievement in contemporary literature—a book that honors the complexity of Central American experience while speaking to universal themes of love, loss, and the search for belonging.
This is essential reading for anyone interested in how literature can illuminate the spaces between official history and lived experience, between the lives we inherit and the ones we might choose to create.
