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Fearless author finds meaning in mean streets
Saturday, May 14, 2005
By Isabel Nathaniel
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Daniel Alarcón's stories are in the thick of
things: guerrilla war in the Peruvian jungle, hustle and violence
on Lima streets, death on Dyckman Street in upper Manhattan. The
work of this young Peruvian-American has been buzzed about since
his first published story, "City of Clowns," appeared
in The New Yorker in 2003. This debut collection, War by Candlelight,
is further proof of how good he is.
Mr. Alarcón lays the discipline of the short
story onto the chaos of events. In "Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979,"
10 young compañeros, in "worship of frivolous violence"
announce themselves as revolutionaries by slaughtering dogs and
hanging them, with slogans, from street lamps:
"You should know the homeless dogs of Lima
inhabit a higher plane of ruthlessness. They own the alleys, they
are thieves of the colonial city, undressing trash heaps, urinating
in cobblestone corners, always with an eye open. They're witnesses
to murders, robberies, shakedowns; they hustle through the streets
with self-assurance, with a confidence that comes from knowing
they don't have to eat every day to live. That night we ran all
over the plaza, butchering them, in awe of their treachery, raw
and golden."
The sentences are fearless and electric, amplifying
the dark joys of the mean streets. The author is in love with "beautiful,
disgraced Lima." In story after story the city is a charismatic
character.
Born in Peru, Mr. Alarcón was raised in Birmingham,
Ala. His family returned to Lima each summer, and on a Fulbright
scholarship he returned for a year on his own. His prose is alive
with the seen: the large and dramatic, but also the peripheral glimpse,
like neighborhood kids lacing up their cheap sneakers.
In the title story, the day Fernando will be killed
is announced in the first sentence (an opening that echoes Gabriel
García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold). His
life is presented in vignettes, skipping back and forth in time,
like memory, like pieces of family stories. The brilliant, sensitive
Fernando struggles between wanting the "conventional pleasures"
of wife, child and home, and his moral commitment to fight "the
people's war" for justice. This is the most personal of Mr.
Alarcón's stories, based on an uncle, a political radical,
who disappeared in 1989.
Three stories are set in New York, where Mr. Alarcón
went to college and taught in public schools. In "Suicide on
Third Avenue," David, a Peruvian-American, loves Reena Shah,
an Indian-American. They live together in the city's "darkest
non-basement apartment" on the south edge of Harlem. The rules
of the relationship are that he must clear away his "man things"
and disappear into the streets whenever her mother visits from New
Jersey. He wages a small unwinnable war against their cultural boundaries.Daniel
Alarcón is a master delineator of place. When he puts us
there, when his city becomes our city, the stunner is that everything
is instantly recognizable. That's how we know he has stolen our
minds.
Poet Isabel Nathaniel is the author of
"The Dominion of Lights", which won the Texas Institute
of Letters award for best book of poetry.
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