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Sunday, April 17, 2005
By Brad Vice
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There is much to admire in Daniel Alarcon's story
collection, "War by Candlelight." Born in Lima, Peru,
and raised in the States, Alarcon writes of his native country with
a burning youthful ambition that, for the most part, illuminates
and inspires. This is not the lush tropical prose we have come to
associate with South American writers.
No, Alarcon's stories are tales of urban street crime
mixed with a social realist's political sensitivities; his prose
might be categorized as political noir. He reminds one of a strange
combination of Steinbeck and Raymond Chandler, or perhaps that great
portrayer of the gritty underclass, the now- forgotten Nelson Algren.
Like Algren, Alarcon revels in the squalid conditions of his abused
and neglected characters. Occasionally the reader may flinch at
a story like "Lima, Peru July 28, 1979," not because we
are too sensitive to read about street kids who mutilate Lima's
stray dogs as a form of political protest but because Alarcon writes
about it with a kind of beatnik glee that borders on bloodlust:
"I followed along the narrows of central Lima, beneath her
ragged and decaying balconies, past her boarded buildings, her cloistered
doorways, her shadows. I wanted the mutt dead."
Alarcon is much better at writing about romance than
dead dogs. His stories "Third Avenue Suicide" and "Absence,"
both set in New York, where Alarcon went to university, have a wider
perspective than Alarcon's purely political fiction. In these stories,
the political discourse is refracted through the universal prism
of longing. Filtered this way, the author's social perspective is
more affecting. David, a second-generation Peruvian immigrant, is
increasingly frustrated by his Indian girlfriend's refusal to introduce
him to her family: "David's first, unspoken question grew specifically
out of Reena's description of her father. The rust-red color of
his angry face. How he would disown her. Curse her. Die. Disruptions
to the tranquility of the context were described in terms of international
crisis areas, civil wars. A family torn asunder, a daughter abandoned,
an unsuspecting boyfriend wondering what the hell happened."
In this instance depicting a young man's heart as a battleground
makes readers more attuned to the "international crisis"
at the root of his pain.
In "Absence," a divorced Peruvian painter,
Wari, visits New York to display his work in a gallery. Wari debates
whether he should relocate to the States permanently or return home
when his visa runs out. Since arriving in New York, he has already
come to question his identity: "There was something foreign
about his paintings, as if they were the work of someone else, a
man he used to know, an acquaintance from a distant episode in his
life." The painter looks to several women for a sign as to
whether he should move to New York and start a new life or return
to the limited prosperity of Lima. Between Wari's longing for love
and longing for home, the author creates a terribly moving kind
of loneliness.
Alarcon gets the mix of political noir and sad-guy
heartbreak just right with the story "City of Clowns"
as well. This story has a hard-boiled quality that is at once cynical
and engaging: "In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who
die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated
in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER
GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD." As
a youth, the protagonist, Oscar, was something of a professional
criminal. Working with his father's construction crew, Oscar and
the rest of the gang would often return to a newly refurbished home
or office and burglarize it in relative safety. Now a journalist,
Oscar wants to plunge into the city's shadows once again. Inspired
by an ex-girlfriend who used to seduce him by walking naked on stilts,
Oscar decides to write a feature article on Lima's many street clowns.
For Oscar, clowns are symbolic of his very existence as a denizen
of Lima: "They organized the city for me: buses, street corners,
plazas. They suited my mood. Appropriating the absurd, embracing
shame, they transformed it. Laugh at me. Humiliate me. And when
you do, I've won. Lima was, in fact and in spirit, a city of clowns."
The city of Lima is Daniel Alarcon's most complex
and engaging character, and "War by Candlelight" is a
bitter valentine to his absurd and dangerous mistress. Only when
he forgets to love her does the reader's attention wane.Brad Vice
has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, New Stories from the
South and Best New American Voices. He is the winner of the 2005
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
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