Lima Nights [Hardcover]

Marie Arana (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 30, 2008

From a National Book Award finalist—for her memoir American Chica—and the author of the acclaimed novel Cellophane comes this spare, powerful story of sexual obsession and its consequences.

Carlos Bluhm leads the good life in upper-class Lima: he attends social functions with his elegant wife, goes out drinking with his three best friends, has the occasional, fleeting assignation. . . . Until he meets Maria Fernandez, a dancer at a tango bar in a rough part of town. The beautiful sixteen-year-old intoxicates him. An indigenous dark-skinned Peruvian, she represents everything his safe white world does not, and soon he can’t get her out of his mind. They begin a passionate affair, one that will destroy his marriage and shatter the only reality he’s ever known.

Flash forward twenty years: against all odds, Carlos and Maria have remained together. But when Maria finally presses for a formal commitment, feelings long suppressed erupt in a tense endgame that sends both of them hurtling toward a dangerous resolution that will forever alter their lives.

Brilliantly realized, erotic, unsentimental, Lima Nights is a unique love story and a stunning work of fiction that will reverberate long after its final page.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in Peru's capital city, this spare, unsentimental novel examines the far-reaching and life-changing consequences of sexual obsession. Carlos Bluhm, a married father of two, is enjoying an outing at a sleazy club in 1986 when he meets 15-year-old Juana Maria Fernandez, a dancer working two jobs and living in the slums. Maria is the polar opposite of Carlos's Germanic wife, Sophie, and he is immediately captivated by her. After Carlos takes Maria away for an illicit vacation, Sophie discovers her husband's affair and moves her sons, her mother-in-law and all of the house's possessions while Bluhm is on vacation with his mistress, leaving Bluhm to come home to an empty house. The second half of the book flashes forward 20 years, revealing Carlos and Maria uneasily living together and beginning to drift apart. Trying to preserve the lifestyle she's come to depend upon, Maria makes desperate attempts to keep Carlos under her spell. While the story ends with a whimper, the finely tuned human drama and subversion of the happily-ever-after drive home the setup's inherent sadness. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

In some respects, Lima Nightsis an age-old story about the usual doomed love affair. In others, the tale is not so typical: as Arana delves deep inside her characters to explore Peru's class, social, and generational tensions, an unpredictable story unfolds. While critics disagreed about the relative success of the first half of the novel (which takes place in 1986) versus the second (the present-day story), they concurred that Arana deftly limns the relationship between Carlos and Maria and the changes and power struggles that emerge over time. A couple of critics faulted the characterizations and language ("forced and wooden," said the Rocky Mountain News), but overall, Lima Nightsis a beautiful, mournful novel about the deceptions of love.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press (December 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385342586
• ISBN-13: 978-0385342582
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #751,552 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

www.mariearana.net
Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother. She is the author of an acclaimed memoir "American Chica," which described her bicultural childhood between North and South Americas. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN-Memoir Award, and chosen best book of the year by several publications. Her novels, "Cellophane" and "Lima Nights," are dramatically different works, the first being a rich, lush satire of the Amazon jungle, the second being a stark, urban love story set in contemporary Latin America. Her book "The Writing Life," is a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post, which explores the way writers think and work. Marie's latest book is a biography of the South American liberator Simón Bolívar, which will be released in April 2013. She has written a script for the forthcoming movie, "Girl Rising," which premieres in March 2013. You can find more information about Marie at www.mariearana.net.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars wisdom of the heart January 1, 2009

By tikcuf

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The plot of this book is adequately summarized above in the publishers weekly review which accompanies its amazon listing. On paper, the plot may sound rather pedantic - older married man with cold, distant wife falls in love with beautiful younger woman, leaves wife, etc. etc.

In fact, this particular story is compelling and the telling of it is done masterfully - I couldn't put the book down. In spare prose, the author weaves a powerful story. The story is also enhanced by its romantic setting in politically unstable Peru in the 1980s, and its associated themes of racial and class conflict.

What makes this book extraordinary, however, is the author's wisdom - particularly the insights her characters impart on the mysterious workings of the human heart. The reader is left with a better understanding of love, and a greater compassion for those who make inexplicable and seemingly poor decisions because of love.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fear of intimacy June 12, 2009

By mark jabbour

Format:Hardcover

LIMA NIGHTS (2009) by Marie Arana is a story about an unlikely and unlucky relationship between a forty-something German Peruvian man (white) and a Native (brown) sixteen year-old girl, who he first sees in a dance club in 1986. The story and the relationship span twenty years, to 2006. What we are given by the author is a passionate beginning and an ill-fated end. Nothing of the twenty years the couple spends together is told, and that works because it's essentially a story about sexual attraction, friendship, cultural bias, race, wealth and poverty, that persist timelessly throughout the lifespan. But mostly it's a story about communication, and how the failure to talk honestly can destroy the human bond. It's a story about how fear, anger, and jealousy can wiggle into a relationship when couples cannot express their feelings and desires openly. It's a story about how biased "friends" and stereotypes can undermine a relationship. It's a story about how psychiatry and shamanism--disparate ways of trying to understand and influence what is going on between couples--can both do harm without honest disclosure. It's a story about fear of intimacy. What I took away from this well told tale was a sense of sadness--that attraction is not enough, obligation is not enough, even money is not enough. It was intriguing, honest, unsentimental, and well written. It is a refreshing change from a lot of what is being published and touted today (Happy ending Chick-lit, Boy-lit, Men's fiction, & Women's fiction). There are no heroes, no villains, no anti-heroes, or anti-villains, just an honest, reality based story of two people--their beginning and their end. Five stars.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Sad, but a little improbable (3.25*s) January 14, 2009

By J. Grattan TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This is a novel set in a time of political unrest in Lima, Peru, during the 1980s that explores an improbable and disturbing love affair between Carlos, a married man with two sons, camera salesman, and descendant from the top echelons of Peruvian society, and Maria, an exquisite, dark-skinned young woman of extreme poverty who dances in a bar, where Carlos on a men's night out is completely smitten by Maria. Carlos had not been entirely faithful during his marriage, but in this case, his obsession drives him to take chances and make stupid mistakes, resulting in his wife and children surreptitiously moving out leaving him the mansion that steadily declines over the next twenty years.

Though not formally educated, Marie, beyond her striking appearance, is appealing because of her instinctual ability to relate. But when the author resumes their story twenty years later, still living in their oversized and under furnished house, they have become distant, unable to consolidate or build upon their strong attraction. Influenced by an older female friend, Marie seeks to ward off the possibility of Carlos straying by casting a spell on him, which results in Carlos seeking the advice of a seer. Unfortunately, they unwittingly create a real rupture in their relationship where only vague dissatisfaction had existed.

It is never totally clear as to why Carlos so precipitously disrupted his and his family's lives, though it does happen, but it is even more of a mystery why after twenty years his and Marie's inability to communicate goes so far afield so quickly. We haven't been allowed to really understand these characters. Was their initial, intense rapport only illusion? There is sadness, but that is diminished somewhat by actions that don't resonant as being particularly credible or likely.