09 February 2009
Lost City Radio
By Daniel Alarcón
Peruvian-born novelist Daniel Alarcón emigrated with his family from a turbulent Lima, Peru to the United States when he was three years old, in 1980. His uncle, opposed to the Maoist guerilla Shining Path, disappeared and was killed in 1989. The war haunts much of Alarcón’s writing. His first book, War by Candlelight (2006) was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist. He is recipient of several prestigious fellowships, is associate editor of an award-winning magazine, Etiqueta Negra, published in his native Lima, and currently is visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
His first novel, Lost City Radio (2007), is set in a fictional Latin American country. It is a tale of war and the disappeared that traces the fate of Rey, the missing husband of the female protagonist. Here he describes a placid scene just before Rey, still a schoolboy, is first swept up in political violence.
The town’s jail was two blocks off the plaza, sharing a quiet side street with the humble homes of maids and stonemasons. The exterior of the building was a pale blue, adorned with a rudimentary painting of the national seal, which, if examined up close (as Rey often did), was as blurry and inexact as the pixilated photographs that ran on the front pages of the town’s only newspaper. An old Indian maxim – DON’T LIE, DON’T KILL, DON’T – was inscribed in severe black lettering above the door jamb, perhaps giving the sleepy jail an import it didn’t deserve. Rey liked the jail: he liked to sit with his uncle, whose job, it seemed, consisted of waiting for trouble to manifest itself. According to Trini, there wasn’t enough of it. He complained bitterly about the quiet town, and liked to tell stories of his year in the capital. There was no way of knowing which were true and which were false. To hear Trini tell it, the city was peopled with thieves and louts and killers in equal parts. To hear Trini tell it, he’d been a one-man crime-fighting machine, justice patrolling the crooked streets, all grit and courage. The city! It was hard to imagine: a rotten, dying place, even then, crumbling and full of shadows. But what did it look like? Rey couldn’t picture it: the boiling, black ocean, the jagged coastline, the heavy clouds, the millions draped in perpetual dusk. Here , there was bright sun and real mountain peaks capped with snow. There was an azure sky and a meandering ricer and a cobblestone plaza with a trickling fountain. Lovers held hands on park benches, flowers bloomed in all the municipal flower beds, and the aroma of fresh bread filled the streets in the mornings. Rey’s hometown ended ten blocks form the plaza in any direction, giving way to dusty lanes and irrigated fields and small farmhouses with red-thatched roofs. Trini described a place Rey couldn’t imagine: a city of glamorous decay, a place of neon and diamonds, of guns and money, a place at once glittering and dirty.
Copyright © 2007, reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
