| |
However difficult it may be for a person to straddle two cultures,
it's an advantage for a writer—an advantage Alarcon exploits
with a technical skill and a maturity of feeling that belie his
age
April 20, 2005
By Michael Harris, Special to The Times
------
Sometimes the fault lines that grind and gape beneath
the feet of the characters in these nine stories by Daniel Alarcon,
a talented young Peruvian American writer, are physical. In "The
Visitor," for instance, a landslide in the mountains engulfs
an entire town except for the cemetery where the narrator and his
children had gone to bury a dead baby. His wife, left at home to
recover from the birth, is among the victims. This scene of desolation
is strangely cheerful. Boards from uprooted coffins furnish shelter;
aid packages float down by parachute.
Giddy with shock, the narrator, once poor, realizes
that the best farmland in the area "now had no owner other
than me." More often, the fractures in "War by Candlelight"
are economic and spiritual, though no less real. In "City of
Clowns," a young man who escaped the slums of Lima to become
a journalist is upset when his widowed mother befriends the mistress
for whom his father left her. The father, a skilled workman, remodeled
the houses of the wealthy, cased them for valuables and later burglarized
them. He understood the "essential truth of Lima: if there
is money to be made, it must be bled from these stone and concrete
city blocks," the son recalls with a painful mixture of pride
and guilt. The son even helped his father steal from a generous
family that hired his mother as a maid and paid his way through
private school. "Some win and some lose, and there are ways
to tilt the odds."
While growing up in the United States, Alarcon spent
summers with relatives back in Lima during Peru's civil war against
the Sendero Luminoso. Two of the strongest stories in this collection
are set against the backdrop of this bloody struggle between a repressive
government and vicious Maoist guerrillas.
"Flood" is narrated by a street kid whose
hero, a neighborhood gang leader and former soldier, is locked up
with many of his former enemies in a prison nicknamed the University
because "it's where you went when you finished high school."
When a riot breaks out, the government, rather than risk an assault,
prefers to burn down the prison and kill everyone inside -- captured
terrorists, ordinary inmates and hostages alike.
The title story, which has the bones of a potential
novel, outlines two decades in the life of a man who joins the rebellion
for idealistic reasons and tries to juggle work and family with
periodic stints in jungle training camps. The strains of clandestine
activity, the constant fear, the rifts with friends and kin, the
inevitable moral compromises wear on him, but "[t]he crisis
they had foreseen in their youth had finally arrived. It was too
late to give up."
However difficult it may be for a person to straddle
two cultures, it's an advantage for a writer -- an advantage Alarcon
exploits with a technical skill and a maturity of feeling that belie
his age.
He can describe the pull of the United States as Peruvians
feel it -- as a force that, in "Absence," tempts an artist
visiting New York to steal his host's girlfriend in hope of marrying
her and gaining a permanent visa; and that, in "A Science for
Being Alone," threatens to deprive an unambitious man of his
girlfriend and baby daughter.
But he also is aware of the illusory nature of that
pull. In "A Strong Dead Man," poor immigrant boys playing
by the Hudson River glare at a sightseeing boat laden with tourists.
"[N]one of them knew why they hated that boat so much."
Alarcon knows.
Like all good short-story writers, he has the gift
of compression, of reducing ideas to images. Striking details are
what we remember best from "War by Candlelight." In "Flood,"
it's the dirty torrent that, like the war, sweeps down on arid Lima
from the mountains. In "The Visitor," it's the brightly
colored neckties from a Danish aid package. In "City of Clowns,"
it's the greasepaint, rubber nose and giant shoes the young journalist
dons to hide from the world and himself after his father's death.
Only in disguise can he overcome his disappointment in his mother
and finally bring her some much-needed comfort.
|
|
