Santiago Roncagliolo: Red April

Maya Jaggi reviews Santiago Roncagliolo's Red April.

Mario Vargas Llosa's most despairing novel is a whodunit set amid the blood-steeped Maoist insurgency of Peru's Shining Path. Santiago Roncagliolo's Red April returns to the aftermath of that guerrilla war and counter-insurgency of the 1980s and 90s, when 70,000 people were killed. And like Vargas Llosa's Death in the Andes, it uses the crime thriller genre – notably the spectre of the serial killer – to riveting effect. Yet this novel of the post-boom generation also reveals how insidiously the investigator from Lima becomes part of the problem, as the moral line dissolves between terrorist and counter-terrorist.

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Interview with Santiago Roncagliolo

Santiago Roncagliolo presented his new novel "Memorias de una dama" in Madrid.

El escritor peruano Santiago Roncagliolo inocula buenas dosis de realidad y de historia en su nueva novela, Memorias de una dama, una obra protagonizada en parte por las mafias que durante décadas dominaron en el Caribe y en la que el autor realiza también una sátira del mundo literario.

"Nos hemos vuelto devoradores de realidad. Hace cuarenta años se podían publicar novelas como Rayuela o Cien años de soledad, pero ahora somos muy escépticos e incrédulos y hay que meter mucha realidad para que todo parezca verdad", afirma Roncagliolo.

Tras haberse convertido en 2006 en el ganador más joven del Premio Alfaguara con Abril rojo y haber publicado dos años antes la novela Pudor, traducida a más de diez idiomas y llevada al cine, Roncagliolo demuestra que en lo literario es ambicioso y hace una apuesta arriesgada en su nuevo libro.

Porque no es fácil combinar en una misma novela las vicisitudes de un joven escritor peruano -alter ego del propio Roncagliolo-, que llega a España "desesperado por entrar en el mundo editorial", con las memorias de una anciana millonaria y decadente, cuyo padre, "un pequeño Berlusconi de los trópicos", como lo define el narrador, fue golpista, fascista, agente de la CIA y hombre de la Cosa Nostra. Y todo ello en el convulso Caribe de los años treinta a los sesenta.

Roncagliolo (Lima, 1975) es consciente de que las dictaduras de Trujillo y de Batista, la revolución cubana de Fidel Castro y la influencia de la CIA y de la mafia en ese período "se conocen más o menos". Y sabe también que hay novelas excelentes sobre algunos de esos episodios, como La fiesta del Chivo, de Vargas Llosa, un escritor que sale a relucir varias veces en Memorias de una dama.

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Reader Review: Pudor by Santiago Roncagliolo

This is a novel about intimacy, about the desires and the fears that we don't even confess to those we love, about the secrets we use to protect ourselves from others.

The charcaters are a man who's going to die, a woman who receives anonymous pornography, a boy who sees corpses and a cat that wants sex. Like many families, all the characters live together and the're all alone.

Sometimes it seems to be a very sad and sordid story, sometimes it seems like a comedy. It's what families and feelings have in common, they never agree.

(sent by David Blanco)


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Peruvian Literature

Alfaguara Prize 2007 Jury

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa will preside to the jury of the 10th edition of the Alfaguara Prize 2007. Like in previous editions, the composition of the rest of the jury will not become public until the award is announced.
From his first edition in 1998, outstanding writers have presided over the Jury of the Alfaguara Prize: Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Mendoza, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Jorge Semprún, Luis Mateo Ten, Jose Saramago, Manuel Caballero Bonald and Angeles Mastretta.
The Alfaguara Prize is one of the most important literary awards in Spanish language.
Previously awarded authors include, last year's winner Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo with Abril Rojo, Graciela Montes, Ema Wolf, Laura Restrepo, Xavier Velasco, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Elena Poniatowska, Clara Sánchez, Manuel Vicent.
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Latin American Literature, Spanish Literature

Literary renaissance in Peru

Lima is once again one of Latin America's brightest literary scenes, and in the last year, Peruvian writers have won prestigious literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world for novels that deal with fallout from the war years and, in doing so, add to a growing literature of terrorism and the risks to democracy in fighting it.

Alonso Cueto, who lives in Lima, received the Herralde prize for "The Blue Hour," about a lawyer who discovers that his father, a naval officer, oversaw the torture of political detainees.

Another Lima-born author, Santiago Roncagliolo, won the Alfaguara award for "Red April," about a prosecutor who investigates a bizarre murder in Ayacucho, the region at the center of the violence between the Shining Path guerrillas and government forces.

Even if the plots evoke violence, the general style of writing is reflective and even casual, a relief from the darkness of the past.

"People here are still very melancholic, but they are much more relaxed than they used to be," said Álvaro Lasso, who two years ago founded Estruendo Mudo, a publishing house that has released more than a dozen books by Peruvian and foreign authors. "I'm hesitant to say this, but there is almost a sense of optimism in Lima."

Hopefulness in Peru, of course, comes clouded in narratives that describe how war's legacies seep into daily life. Adrián Ormache, the upper- class lawyer in Cueto's book, finds his comfortable life disrupted when he encounters a woman who escaped captivity by his father; the shock prompts him to plunge into Lima's demimonde of discotheques and roadside bars.

"His father and the Andean world were much closer than he thought," Cueto said of the lawyer. "With its unresolved conflicts, Lima is an ideal place for a writer."

Similarly, Roncagliolo questions the tacit approval of atrocities in a nominal democracy. In his book, a prosecutor is confronted with having experienced the war almost abstractly in Lima as it raged in Ayacucho, and in one passage, an officer challenges him: "I suppose you were reading little poems by Chocano. Literature, right? Literature says too many pretty things, Mr. Prosecutor. Too many. You intellectuals despise the military because we don't read."

In some ways, impoverished Peru is an unlikely spot for a literary renaissance. Its literacy rates trail those in countries like Mexico and Argentina. And literary exile is a longstanding tradition. Like Vargas Llosa, who returns to Lima from homes abroad for a few months each year, Roncagliolo lives abroad, in Spain.

Painful revelations of the cruelties of the "internal war," which essentially ended in 2000, still come to light. It was not until last month that Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path's messianic founder, was sentenced, to life in prison, after a chaotic retrial in 2004.

Today the mood is ambivalent - hesitant to be too hopeful. People seem intent on avoiding the potentially destabilizing populism that has swept Venezuela and Bolivia. The economy is growing, and Peru wants closer ties with Chile and the United States.

"I remember the ritual of taking candles to parties in case of blackouts," said Roncagliolo, who is writing a book on Guzmán. "As Peru's situation improves, terrorism has become a global theme."

The magazine Etiqueta Negra captures Peru's new sense of breaking out of isolation. Founded five years ago, the monthly publishes narrative journalism by foreigners as diverse as the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski and the American author Susan Orlean, as well as by Peruvian writers.

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Santiago Roncagliolo wins Alfaguara Spanish-language literary prize

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo won Spain's Alfaguara Spanish-language literary prize on Monday for his novel Abril rojo, or Red April, which tells of life in his country under the government of former president Alberto Fujimori.

The novel, a detective story set within a political background, unfolds in the Peru of the early 2000s when the government, led by Japanese-born Fujimori, clashed with the hard left Shining Path guerrilla insurgency.

"I grew up during a war that no-one talked about, our windows were taped to avoid them rattling or shattering when bombs went off and we knew better than to park outside military installations for fear of having our car blown up by accident," Roncagliolo told journalists.

The novel was chosen from 510 entries, of which 141 came from Spain and 369 from Latin American authors.

The award, worth $175,000 US, also included a work by Spanish sculptor Martin Chirino.

"In Peru, many of those who disappeared and were tortured did so at the mercy of a government that we elected democratically, so to some extent we were all responsible for the deaths and torture," Roncagliolo said.

The prize is organized by the Alfaguara publishing house. Argentine authors Graciela Montes and Ema Wolf won the award last year, and Colombia's Laura Restrepo the year before.