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Debuts from Daniel Alarcón and Rattawut Lapcharoensap
focus on the more exotic parts of their personal histories, says
Hephzibah Anderson
Sunday April 24, 2005
The Observer
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Daniel Alarcón's War by Candlelight (Fourth
Estate £15.99, pp189) is a luminous beginning, crackling with
attitude. Its contents flit between Lima and a 'folkloric' New York
where 'the air was swollen with foreign tongues'. Alarcón
is an urban wordsmith, attuned to big-city life, but 'beautiful,
disgraced' Lima is his true muse and he serenades her slums and
suburbs, her conmen and dreamers in such tales as 'City of Clowns'.
Probably the collection's strongest, it tells of Chino,
a poor boy who won a scholarship to a decent school and became a
journalist. A newspaper assignment to write about Lima's itinerant
clowns coincides with the death of his father, a crook who'd left
him and his mother for a second, secret family. In mourning, the
wife and mistress comfort one another, compounding Chino's fury.
Going undercover, he learns to contemplate his world through a clown's
eyes.
The atmosphere of these stories owes plenty to Peru's
political instability, and this volatility extends to physical settings,
too. 'The Visitor' describes the aftermath of a landslide, while
in the opening story, 'Flood', a lagoon spills over and courses
down a city avenue, creating 'a kind of miracle, a ribbon of gleaming
water' whose 'oily skin' shines orange come dusk.
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