A roundtable discussion (by e-mail) joining Daniel Alarcón, Eduardo Halfon, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez.

I started thinking about language—I mean really thinking about it—a few years ago when I signed up for first-semester Arabic at UC Berkeley. There was something about entering a language knowing absolutely nothing that made me consider what it is I know about those two languages I do speak (and read and write), English and Spanish. In class, we began with the alphabet, the sounds each symbol represented, and even now I am still working on the construction of sound, words, sentences. It’s been said before that language is the architecture of thought, and while I’m not convinced this is entirely accurate (my two-year-old nephew conveys a great deal without the benefit of words) it seems self-evident when one is beginning, when the immensity of all that you don’t know is overwhelming. I’m referring to the poetry of a language, of course, the beauty of which is most apparent (for me) when it is used in daily life—this is the level at which it is transformed, made new. This is the level of language-creation that I find most inspiring when I’m writing, which is odd, considering I write in English; the language I love most is Spanish. Not the literary language, necessarily, but its spoken dialects. It is impossible not to be awed by the inventiveness the language as it exists all over Latin America and Spain, the breadth and diversity of it, the way each local and regional vernacular traces a particular history, honors it, then subverts it, transcends it.

I wanted to talk about the most basic tool that writers utilize—language—with two artists uniquely situated to understand its significance. For most of us, the language we work in is a matter of circumstance, not choice; our language is an inheritance, an accident of the time and place of our birth, the education we were given or subjected to, the country we or our parents emigrated to. Eduardo Halfon and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, two fluent, native English speakers raised in the United States, have both chosen Spanish as their literary language; something that I’ll admit struck me at first as crazy. I mean, isn’t writing fiction hard enough already?

Eduardo Halfon was born in 1971 in Guatemala City. He studied Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University, and has published eight books of fiction, most of them in Spain, garnering wide critical praise. His latest novel, The Pirouette, to be published in 2010, was recently awarded the XIV José María de Pereda Literary Prize, in Cantabria, Spain. His work has been translated into Serbian and Portuguese. In 2007 the Hay Festival of Bogotá named him one of the best young Latin American writers.

Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an unrepentant border-crosser, painter, former DJ, and currently teaches US Latino literatures and creative writing in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in the Barcelona Review, Ventana abierta, Paralelo Sur, and in the anthologies Líneas aéreas, Se habla español: voces latinas en US, Pequeñas resistencias 4: Antología del Nuevo cuento norteamericano y caribeño, and En la frontera: I migliori racconti della narrativa chicana.

I began this email conversation with a simple, obvious question: Why and how did these two writers make the decision to write in Spanish?

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Latin American Literature

Best books of 2007

The Washington Post's best books of 2007 list includes seven Spanish and Latin American authors.

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (FSG). Irresistibly entertaining and, like all of its author's work, formidably smart. - Jonathan Yardley

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot DIaz (Riverhead). Oscar clearly is not intended to function as a hero in the classical sense. Geek swagger, baby. Get used to it. - Jabari Asim

Delirium, by Laura Restrepo; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Nan A. Talese). A book-and-a-half: stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing. The setting is Bogota, Colombia. Far above politics, right up into high art. - Carolyn See

In Her Absence, by Antonio Munoz Molina; translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other). This elegant, precise and inimitable novel focuses intensely on a civil servant and his passionate yet painful relationship with his wife of six years. - Brigitte Weeks

Nada, by Carmen Laforet; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Modern Library). After six decades, it has lost none of its power and originality, and we are fortunate to have it in this fine translation. - JY

Dancing to "Almendra", by Mayra Montero; translated by Edith Grossman (FSG). The fictional, gossamer beauty and blood-soaked brutality that personifies Cuba of 1957. - Joanne Omang

Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins). Readers will recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Peru. A fable for the entire continent. - Jonathan Yardley

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Latin American Literature

República y Grau

A short story by Daniel Alarcón.

El ciego vivía solo en una habitación independiente encima de una bodega, en una calle no muy lejos de la casa de Maico. Se ubicaba subiendo una pequeña cuesta, como todo en aquel barrio. No había nada en las paredes de la habitación del ciego, ni un lugar donde sentarse, de manera que Maico se quedó de pie. Tenía diez años. Había una cama de una plaza, una mesita de noche con una radio envuelta con cinta adhesiva y una bacinica. El ciego tenía el cabello entrecano y era mucho mayor que el padre de Maico. El niño bajó la mirada y formó con los pies un pequeño montículo de polvo en el suelo de cemento, mientras su padre y el ciego hablaban. El niño no los escuchaba, pero nadie esperaba tampoco que lo hiciera. No se sorprendió cuando una diminuta araña negra emergió del insignificante montículo que había formado. La araña se alejó rápidamente por el piso y desapareció bajo la cama. Maico levantó la mirada. Una telaraña brillaba en una esquina del techo. Era la única decoración del cuarto.

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Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru in 1977 and raised in the Southern United States. He is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a monthly magazine based in Lima. His works include the short story collection "War by Candlelight" and the novel "Lost City Radio".





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Peruvian Literature

Daniel Alarcón - Lost City Radio

Boyd Tonkin reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

This is a formidably accomplished first novel. Alarcón's nameless country feels as intensely real as the riotous flora of its rainforests or the reeking slums of its cities. Yet its location beyond any map allows him to synthesise the ordeals of many places into a fable of loss and longing that decodes the "indecipherable text" of every murky civil war. As I found out in Colombia this year, the unfinished business of Latin America's armed conflicts - in states with a semblance of political peace, but no proper social resolution - has been preying on creative minds across the continent.

Alarcón surveys this "postconflict" landscape in a style that weds gravity to grace - but he does so as an Anglophone author rooted in Hispanic realities. We know that fiction in English has flourished for over half a century in the Indian subcontinent. Much more recent is the wave of Anglophone writing from regions that lack the same history of colonisation or settlement. The Bogotá "39 under 39" list has another rising star who only writes in English: Junot Diaz from the Dominican Republic, but now settled in the US.

In the past, a literary shift of tongues signalled a permanent state of exile or emigration: think of Nabokov, or Conrad. Now we enjoy more flexible times, in which a writer such as Alarcón can be claimed, and acclaimed, by two continents at once. Yet it's still the English language that tends to reap the benefits of this hybridity. Secure in its hegemony, English can say to the world, "Make yourself at home". Even if, in this case, the Spanish sounds far sweeter: Mi casa es tu casa. Read More

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Peruvian Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

John Freeman reviews Daniel Alarcón's "Lost City Radio".

This novel could feel like a political tract, were it not so skilful at portraying the moral insanity of war. Lost City Radio reveals how hard it is to separate villains from victims, killers from the killed.

The novel's key plot revolves around a boy who is sent from a village to the city to have a list of names read on Norma's show. His appearance sets off a chain of events that show how all the characters are more connected than at first appears.

Alarcón is still in his late 20s, but he has a veteran's control of the complicated plot mechanisms this storyline requires. More impressively, time and again he resists the urge to bring the hammer of judgment down upon any of his characters.

We emerge from this impressive political fable with a profound sense of loss and rage, and a clarifying glimpse into the futility of violence.

"What does the end of a war mean," Alarcón writes, early in the novel, "if not that one side ran out of men willing to die?" Read More

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Latin American Literature

Amanda Heller reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio

We have been here before, in the totalitarian brave new world of "Lost City Radio." This self-defeated place has no name, though that of the author's native Peru will do as well as any other.

The heroine of the novel, Norma, is her unhappy country's earth mother of the airwaves. On her radio show she reads aching messages from people looking for loved ones separated over years of war and disruption or, more likely, "disappeared" into the grasp of a vicious regime. What her listeners do not know is that Norma's husband, Rey, is among the missing. Rey has a second, secret life, which Norma suspects, as a member of the underground insurgency, and another about which she knows nothing until a boy from the exotic interior makes his way to the city seeking her help.

An expansive political fable, an urgent mystery, a story of doomed love: Daniel Alarcón has chosen no easy assignment for his first novel. Fortunately his talent is equal to the task. No one in the compromised world of "Lost City Radio" is as innocent as we suppose or as guilty as charged by a paranoid dictatorship. Alarcón relates this haunting tale in shades of gray, breaking the rules for concocting a fable but honoring those for conveying truth.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

John Freeman reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

"One man's freedom fighter," Nelson Mandela famously argued, "is another's man's terrorist." In his debut novel, Lost City Radio, Daniel Alarcon reminds that one man's freedom fighter is probably another woman's husband, another boy's father, certainly another man's son.

Set in a fictional Latin American republic, Lost City Radio depicts the trauma inflicted upon a society when these fighters — be they vigilantes or soldiers on the side of the government — simply disappear.

The book takes its title from a popular radio show in what Alarcón describes as the nation's "provincial capital." Each Sunday, the station broadcasts the names of the disappeared. "The idea was simple. How many refugees had come to the city? How many of them had lost touch with their families? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?"

The voice connecting the lost with the found belongs to Norma, a brave, beautiful and damaged journalist whom Alarcón brings vividly to life. Her husband, Rey, has been missing for more than a decade.

A decade later, Norma still sleeps alone, facing the door to her bedroom, as if Rey might still come home in the night.

Lost City Radio then cycles backward to tell the story of the country's war, the way it fractured the committed from the fearful, the urban from the rural and the collaborators from the resisters.

Based on Alarcón's descriptions, the country might be Argentina or Chile or the author's native Peru — all countries racked by civil wars and state-sponsored disappearances.

But the observations this book makes aren't limited to Latin America, especially when it comes to the siren call of violence: "Before the war began, those of Norma's generation still spoke of violence with awe and reverence," Alarcón writes: "cleansing violence, purifying violence, violence that would spawn virtue."

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

Laura Axelrod reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

The most striking quality of Daniel Alarcon's book, "Lost City Radio," is the depth of artistry in his prose. This is a book that is not only meant to be read, but also experienced.

It begins in a South American country, at a radio station deep in a war-torn city. A young boy appears with a list of those missing from his village. He is told to look for the host of a radio show about missing people. Perhaps Norma will read his list on the air and villagers will be reunited.

The reasons for the war are unstated. What the rebels believed is never made clear. This intentional vagueness leaves readers to focus on the effects of the war - the random disappearances, ID checks and spying, the lost people.

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Latin American Literature

Reading Others

On Alejandro González Iñárritu: A review of 21 Grams in Five Branch Tree and a review of Babel by Aditya.
A Daniel Alarcón read at City Lights bookstore by Favianna.
orshouldi on José Saramago's Blindness.
Daniel Stephens reviews Fernando Meirelles' City of God.

Interview with Daniel Alarcón

This is the world Daniel Alarcón has created in his first novel, Lost City Radio. Born in Peru but raised in Birmingham, Ala., Alarcón often visited relatives in Lima when the Peruvian troops were engaged by the guerilla outfit, Shining Path.
Even now, he cannot completely fathom what happened.
"To a certain extent, it's unimaginable to me," he says. "I've gone back to collect the stories and talk to people, but I haven't lived through these things I described. The process of writing the story - it was all about keeping myself in it, in that world. ... And I agree, it's not necessarily a world I want to hang out in."
Nevertheless, it was a story he felt compelled to write. The title refers to a radio program in which the names of missing people are read. Norma is the beguiling host. Her voice is "her greatest asset, her career and her fate," bringing hope to people desperate to find their lost loved ones.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Daniel Alarcón writes with a poet's heart and a reporter's skill. He began researching the book in 1999, interviewing those who'd survived the violence that tore through his native Peru, and studying other conflicts around the globe. His journalism paid off. "Lost City Radio" is filled with startling images that are impossible to shake: A boy from the rain forest longs to see the ocean, not to play in the surf, but to search for his mother's battered body. Government soldiers bury prisoners to their necks, then urinate on their faces. Rebels lop off a man's hands while his children watch.

But all is not carnage and cruelty. Alarcón understands the yin/yang of warfare and its aftermath, and describes with beautiful, succinct prose how opposing sensibilities - loyalty and treachery, tenderness and brutality - can co-exist in the same body, the same place, like dandelions poking through chunks of broken asphalt.

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Latin American Literature

Daniel Alarcón in Granta's Best Young American Novelists list.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

'One man's freedom fighter," it has been said, "is another's man's terrorist." In his debut novel, Lost City Radio, Daniel Alarcon reminds that one man's freedom fighter is probably another woman's husband, another boy's father, certainly another man's son.

Set in a fictional Latin American republic, Lost City Radio depicts the trauma inflicted upon a society when these freedom fighters - be they vigilantes or soldiers on the side of the government - simply disappear.

The book takes its title from a popular radio show in what Alarcon calls "the provincial capital." Each Sunday, the station broadcasts the names of the disappeared.

"The idea was simple. How many refugees had come to the city? How many of them had lost touch with their families? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?"

The voice connecting the lost with the found belongs to Norma, a brave, beautiful and damaged journalist whom Alarcon brings vividly to life. Her husband, Rey, has been missing for more than a decade.

Alarcon's portrait of the emotional toll this loss takes on Norma is heartrending. A decade later, she still sleeps alone, facing the door to her bedroom, as if Rey might still walk through the door.

Lost City Radio then cycles backward to tell the story of the country's war, the way it fractured the committed from the fearful, the urban from the rural, and the collaborative from the resistant.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

Two new reviews of Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

Daniel Alarcon's compelling debut novel, "Lost City Radio," opens with a visitor to a radio station: Victor, an 11-year-old boy from the jungle sent as an envoy by his village to the city bearing a list of names to Norma, host of the weekly program "Lost City Radio." On the list of names is one Norma recognizes, one she is forbidden to pronounce.
Ten years have passed since the war ended. The tanks have stopped, the government-approved battle reports have given way to government-scrubbed news bulletins, members of the "Illegitimate Legion" (echoes of Peru's Shining Path insurgency) dispersed, jailed or killed. But disappearances continue. Most who were lost during the decade of war are not found. The old towns' names are replaced by a numbering system, the history books amended, the citizens made diligent informants.
In this "nation at the edge of the world, a make-believe country outside history," only Norma's voice speaks to those displaced or left behind. Listeners call with names of loved ones not heard from, and her voice becomes theirs. With a microphone at the only national radio station, Norma dreams of the day when she can call out a name of her own -- "Rey," or even his nom de guerre that now appears on a list in the boy Victor's hand -- calling to her husband, gone these 10 years since the war, and calling him home.

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With the publication two years ago of his short-story collection "War by Candlelight" (HarperCollins), Daniel Alarcón received critical acclaim that included comparisons to Mario Vargas Llosa, Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway.
Born in Peru and living in northern California, Alarcón unflinchingly portrays people battered by civil strife, natural disasters and governmental abuses. He now brings us his first novel, "Lost City Radio" (HarperCollins, hardcover $24.95), a potent, disturbing, but, in the end, hopeful portrait of a nation torn by years of war and betrayal.
Set in an unnamed South American country, Alarcón's novel centers on Norma, the host of a popular program, "Lost City Radio," in which she reads the names of missing persons and lends an understanding ear to callers who hope she can help them reunite with lost loved ones. Norma has become a celebrity, a voice everyone knows, the apolitical salve for a nation that has lost too much.

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

At first glance, Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón has the look of a political fable. It tells the story of an anonymous Latin American nation, first ravaged by a pointless war and now governed by a faceless totalitarian regime. The book's tone is chillingly Orwellian.
But politicians – either of the left or the right – are neither the real heroes or the villains in this haunting debut novel. "Lost City Radio" is indeed a wrenching commentary on the devastation war can inflict. But the mystery at the heart of this story is not political – it's a riddle of the human heart.

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Daniel Alarcón

I’m Peruvian, the general arc of the war as it unfolds in the novel is similar to that of the Peruvian conflict, and everyone will be able to recognize this. Still, the more I’ve traveled, the more places I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to, the more it has become clear to me that the forces shaping the future of a city like Lima are at work in developing countries all over the planet. When I was on tour last, for War by Candlelight, I always found myself saying, “If Peru was an invented country, and Lima an invented city, many people would still recognize it,” and I guess I sort of followed my own advice. I invented a country, a city, drew upon my experiences in Lima, upon my travels in West Africa, upon texts I read about Chechnya (the incomparable Anna Politkovskaya, RIP), or Beirut, or Mumbai. I was influenced and deeply inspired by the work of Joe Sacco as well, whose books on Palestine and Bosnia are truly masterful. The liberty to call on all kinds of sources was freeing: I came across a book called Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist, possibly apocryphal, but it rang so true when compared with the interviews I had done in Peru and Bolivia, that I felt confident referencing it in my attempt to create a composite of what that life might have been like.

Read Daniel Alarcón’s interview at The Elegant Variation

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

Two reviews of Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio.

Although Lost City Radio is Daniel Alarcón's first novel, his previous short stories hold a novel-like attachment to one protagonist: the city of Lima. In the young Peruvian American author's 2005 collection, War by Candlelight, Lima wasn't just a staging ground for the rotating casts of characters; the city emerged as the book's subject.

Alarcón's brief oeuvre has been rooted in the deep textures of place: In the fittingly titled short story "Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979," every page finds a new avatar, from the "roadside mechanics . . . stained oily black from head to toe . . . the fiercest angels, the city's living dead" to a man in an "ill-fitting suit" selling Chiclets on a crosstown bus. So it's significant to a nearly heavy-handed degree that Lost City Radio never offers the name of the South American nation where it occurs. The country's towns don't even have names: In the aftermath of a long war, the government has replaced the quirky local tags—"unwieldy, millenarian name[s] from God-knows-which extinct people"—with Orwellian numbers: 1797, 1791, 1793.

The war—as vaguely defined as the country it tears up—is the central event in Alarcón's novel. In the present, where we begin, the conflict officially ended a decade before, but the war's legacy still composes both the professional and personal world of our main character. Norma is a honey-voiced DJ with a popular weekly show, Lost City Radio, in which citizens appear on-air to describe loved ones lost in the massive upheaval. Inevitably, she's patient as well as doctor; her own husband, Rey, an ethnobotanist with a passion for fungi and, just maybe, violent revolution, went missing in the war's final period, and she longs to turn her studio into a personal pulpit.

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Daniel Alarcón's thoughtful, engaging first novel is set in a fictitious South American country where the reader will immediately recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Alarcón's native country, Peru. No name is ever given to the country: Alarcón means the novel to be a fable about civil wars and their repercussions, rather than an account of a specific war within a specific place to which we bring all the baggage of familiarity.

With the publication of Lost City Radio, Alarcón is off and running. His collection of short stories, War by Candlelight, was published two years ago to deservedly high praise. Now still in his late 20s, Alarcón has an impressive and rather unusual background. He was brought to this country when he was very young because of the dreadful violence that swept through Peru in the 1980s and '90s during the terrorist uprisings led by the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru movements. In recent years, he has spent a lot of time in one of the poorest barrios of Lima, and much of his fiction is about the people who live there.

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Latin American Literature