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This spring, readers can turn to four new books that draw on
real-life conflicts now past — though perhaps not yet over
April 7, 2005
By J.L. Johnson
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A series of nine burnt matchsticks marches down the
cover of Daniel Alarcón’s debut short-story collection,
War by Candlelight, and it’s an incredibly apt visual metaphor.
Each of these nine stories provides a dazzling but brief glimpse
of Alarcón’s talent, which is informed by the natural
and political upheavals in his native Peru. War in its conventional
sense is not the theme here; instead, Alarcón uses both physical
and emotional battlefields for his characters’ struggles.
The first story, "Flood," opens with a battle
between street gangs: "We spilled into the avenue and fought
like men, side by side with our fathers and brothers against their
fathers and brothers. It was a carnival. My hands moved in closed
fists and I was in awe of them.... We were blind with happiness."
The boyish exuberant violence of throwing rocks and swinging bats
is answered at the end with a picture of terrucos rioting at a prison,
executing guards and throwing their bodies from the tower, before
government forces put a final, shocking end to it.
Standouts in the collection include "City of
Clowns," in which a grown son wrestles with his father’s
ghost; the doomed romance "Third Avenue Suicide"; and
the two stories tied most closely to Peru’s volatile history,
"Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979," and the title story, "War
by Candlelight," a mosaic of events in the life of a rebel
leader. However, readers will find memorable passages, brutal and
lovely, throughout War by Candlelight, as the characters do battle
with themselves, each other, and the world.
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