April 3, 2005
By Cherie Parker
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Very good short-story collections can be as unsatisfying as a tasty meal of too-small portions. What would happen, one might think upon reading a particularly promising collection, if this writer were to take an idea to fruition? Would the elegant prose fall apart under the demands of a fully formed narrative plan? "War by Candlelight," the sublime new short-story collection by Daniel Alarcón, raises these kinds of questions because precise, searing language and immediately embraceable characters would seem to deserve the fullest expression possible.

If Alarcón's work in "War by Candlelight" is impressive, his pedigree suggests that his sensitivity and intellect are the result of careful grooming. He was born in Lima, Peru, in 1977 and raised in Birmingham, Ala. His résumé includes this prestigious grouping: Columbia, Fulbright, Iowa Writer's Workshop. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker and Harper's.

Alarcón's subject matters vary, but political and social upheaval in the land of his birth are recurring themes. So are longing and isolation. One of Alarcón's most distinguishing charms is his ability to create believable and complex characters quickly. At the center of many stories are young men, romantic and world-weary. In "City of Clowns," reporter Oscar Uribe mourns his father by revisiting the Lima neighborhoods of his youth -- both in his memory and hidden in the guise of a street clown. In "Third Avenue Suicide," a young man named David slips ever deeper into helplessness and desperation as the lie he and his Hindi girlfriend created to spare her parents the knowledge of their cohabitation gradually erases the significance of their relationship. In "A Science for Being Alone," Miguel proposes to the mother of his daughter every year on the daughter's birthday, an act that is both warmly symbolic and increasingly hopeless.

Being both North American and South American gives Alarcón legitimate grounding in the literary traditions of two cultures, and he plumbs the best of each. Often, his word choice appears as South American magical realism dosed with East Coast angry existentialism, creating a hybrid style of his own: imaginative, yet coldly on point. In "Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979," he writes: "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."

Alarcón's skill with language and his eye for the beautiful tragedy of the human condition are on brilliant display in "War by Candlelight." But because these stories are a scattershot collection of unrelated odds and sods combined with the truncated nature of short stories themselves, it is yet to be seen what this talented young voice truly has to say. Reported to be at work on a novel, Alarcón has given us all a tantalizing appetizer while we wait for our dinner to arrive.

Cherie Parker is a Minneapolis-based freelance journalist.