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Friday, May 20, 2005
By Michael Upchurch
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Say "Dublin," and James Joyce comes instantly
to mind. Say "London," and any number of writers pop into
imaginative view.
Say "Lima, Peru," however, and most American
readers are likely to draw a blank.
That may be about to change.
In Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcón's
debut story collection "War by Candlelight" (HarperCollins,
189 pp., $23.95), the sights and sounds and tensions of the Peruvian
capital come brilliantly alive. Not every tale here is a masterpiece,
but several are. And in all of them — even those set in New
York, where Lima serves more as an offstage character — Alarcón's
qualified love for the troubled city where he was born is palpable.
Alarcón sees Lima, variously, through the eyes
of street urchins swept up in petty gang battles; a journalist who's
made to feel his success is a betrayal of his old neighborhood;
an artist-turned-terrorist whose family members fall along different
points on the political spectrum.
He also gives some surprisingly sympathetic glimpses
of Lima's wealthier classes. While several of his characters are
pushed to the point of violence by a passion to remedy their country's
social inequities, there's nothing simplistic in the vision he offers
of them or of a Peruvian society at war with itself (the Shining
Path movement of the 1980s and '90s, although unnamed, figures prominently
in the book).
The title story is the book's most ambitious entry.
Skipping back and forth through time, it examines how gifted art
student Fernando, from a loving and supportive middle-class family,
could come to believe that guerrilla terrorism is the best solution
to his country's systemic poverty and injustice.
Fernando himself grows ambivalent about his activities
after he becomes a father. Still, he commits himself to the fight.
The glimpses one gets here of a bomb-threatened Lima
and of rural Peru are striking.
The Andes become a "grand theater of wind and
sky, mountain and water, and so much quiet." The bus Fernando
takes to get through them is a "contraption held together by
ingenuity ... Repairs were cruel surgeries of convenience."
Every image is sharp; each observation rings true.
Nevertheless "War by Candlelight" is easily
topped by two Lima-set stories that blend fine writing and tough
observation with a still more fluid narrative playfulness.
In "City of Clowns," journalist Oscar Uribe
recalls his boyhood while pursuing a story about Lima's surprisingly
abundant clown population. His father was a housing renovator with
a habit of burglarizing the villas he fixed up a few months after
working on them; his mother was a maid for a family whose devotion
to her led them to pay for Oscar's private schooling, where he was
picked on by richer boys.
Needless to say, the grown-up Oscar — who occasionally
helped his father out — suffers some conflicts of conscience.
And in Lima's clown population, he unexpectedly finds kindred souls:
"They suited my mood. Appropriating the absurd, embracing shame,
they transformed it. Laugh at me. Humiliate me. And when you do,
I've won."
"A Science for Being Alone" initially seems
a less political tale than "Clowns," as it describes the
desperate efforts of a laid-off bank employee to marry the mother
of his 5-year-old daughter. We know from the start that he'll lose
them both. But the complications of how he got into this jam are
as funny as they are sad.
Tempted by a life in the U.S., the mother ultimately
spurns the father of her child for reasons that have more to do
with Lima than the man himself. "In this city," he laments,
"there is nothing more useless than imagining a life. ... There
is no work. There is nothing I could have promised her in that moment
that wouldn't have been built on imagination. Or worse, on luck."
A discouraging verdict. Still, Alarcón handles
the couple's final moment of reckoning in a manner more wily than
downbeat. And the tale's last turn of phrase provides it with a
perfect closing flourish.
Other strong entries: "Third Avenue Suicide,"
about a Peruvian in New York whose Indian girlfriend keeps him a
secret from her traditionalist mother, and "Absence,"
which draws an affecting parallel between a Peruvian weighing possible
U.S. exile and a New Yorker mourning the loss to her city inflicted
by terrorist attack.
In a handful of places, Alarcón spoils his
effect by reaching for last-minute uplift, especially in the book's
closing story, "A Strong Dead Man."
But there's no denying this is a notable debut by
a young author whose sharp observational eye has some gritty knowledge
of human hope and foible behind it.
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