Customer Reviews

Lima Nights: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Arana is certainly capable of producing well-formed prose. But in this novel, even more than in "Cellophane", plot deficiencies challenge the reader.

A (white) middle-aged family man, not above the occasional one night stand, suddenly falls for a 15, soon to be 16, year old (indian) girl he meets at a nightclub. He just happens to be the first customer into whose pocket she slips her name and phone number. After a few encounters he hatches a poorly considered plan to turn a family vacation at the beach into a seaside rendezvous with her. His wife figures it out, and has moved his family, including his mother, even including most of the furniture, out of his house before he returns. Things seem to happen fast in Peru.

Or, maybe not. Twenty plus years then pass (quickly, in page count) with the man and younger woman living together in his house. They don't seem to learn much about each other in that time. She wants to get married, and there seems to be no real impediment beyond the social opposition of a white-indian union. But from whom? His drinking buddies? His estranged family? His coworkers at menial jobs?

The "last act" is an awkward blend of Greek tragedy and slapstick comedy. Misunderstanding after misunderstanding, just missed opportunity after just missed opportunity. Within limits, it can work. Shakespeare, for example, pulled it off on a smaller scale in "Romeo and Juliet". But Arana's plot asks too much. (And, smooth as she is, she's no Shakespeare.)

I made it through the book because the prose is so well turned. But, when I was done, I could only shake my head about the story.

When I first saw this book, it was in my local library. I looked at the cover and read the back of the book to know a bit of the story. I can say it didn't really grab my hold, but something telling me there was more to it.



It has been a few months since I have read it, but I will say the insight on the Peruvian culture is rather good and it shows a little truth on the Spanish culture. I'm Spanish myself and see this type of story play out many times in my daily life.

I will say that is what got me about the book really. It was very real and very alive.

It very well showed dreams of this young girl of how she wanted a wonderful life and that this man is her prince charming to come save her.

Than you have this man who sees someone who is alive, bring in new life into his life where his wife is cold to him. The passion in their marriage is not that anymore. The man than sees what he did had and what he gave up. From here we see the dream come apart for the both of them.

If I could I would buy the book and read it again!

Lima Nights is a rather deceptive title, one that suggests thanks to the cover, that the reader is in for a romp with putas. The review I read in The New York Times, not the title, not the cover, is why I purchased the book--and, wow, am I delighted I did. It is now going to be one of the books I have my college writing classes read. (There is one factual piece that I question, however. Here in South Florida our bougainvilleas do not have any wonderful aromas, but maybe they do in Peru.)
Bluhm's family originated in Germany. Maria's originated at the mouth of the Amazon. And this is the love story of the older man and a teenage girl who works two jobs, one as a dancer in a little bar. So the prostitute part is there but only tangentially.
Bluhm is married and lives in the house his grandfather purchased when he immigrated to Peru. And he has two sons who are essentially the age of Maria. I will not spoil the plot by saying more about what happens although the reader will already have predicated that. But this is a story told by a very skilled novelist, one in which the reader is allowed to see multiples of points of view. It is also the story of racism, of white men--and Bluhm has three buddies his age who are also womanizers--who use women and then discard them. And it is rich in irony.
One scene in particular stands out for me: Maria's dollhouse that Bluhm made for her. The house Bluhm owns becomes the metaphor that carries the ironic plot. I won't say any more than that.
The reader is exposed to so much about the Peruvian culture where poverty is rampant, where the Incas are less-thans when in fact they are so much more than the white people who have exploited so much of the Western Hemisphere.

This is quite a brilliant little novel, a middle-aged man obsessed with the sultry beauty, dark skin and flashing eyes of a dancer he meets in a Lima nightclub in the 1980s. Of German Lineage, Carlos Bluhm enjoys a comfortable life; a camera salesman, he has long-time friends, a wife and two sons, an inherited home in an exclusive part of the city, quiet leafy streets where the stench of poverty doesn't intrude. The girl, fifteen-year-old Juana Maria Fernandez, knows the ravages of poverty intimately, her mother and brothers living in near-squalor, Maria desperate to avoid her mother's fate. When his imagination settles on the lithe beauty of the dancer, Carlos becomes of two minds, his normal world colliding with the secret one, where he compulsively visualizes Maria, desires only the stolen minutes with her, which soon are not enough. Thinking himself clever, Carlos is careless, his duplicity eventually exposing a man in thrall to his passions, willing to deny everything to have what he wants.

Like a man possessed, Bluhm will not- or cannot- entertain reason, his only desire to placate and shelter this young woman, to escape reality with her. For her part, Maria is near feral in her instincts. Barely educated, she knows only that security may be delivered by this man, social conventions and practicalities aside. Arana exposes the intimate longings of her two protagonists, caught up in a dynamic driven by Bluhm's need and Maria's instinct for self-preservation. Whatever he has imagined for his life, Maria becomes central, necessary, nothing as significant. While the government struggles with a constant threat from home-grown terrorism, Carlos blows up his own life without outside agitation, the collateral damage of loved ones barely registering. This attraction between Carlos and Maria endures for twenty years, the author weaving in subtle threads of waning passion, nascent jealousy and the odd behaviors of enchantment grown stale. Even then Carlos and Maria are inextricably linked, clinging to a past that no longer exists. Artful and exotic, if occasionally baffling, Lima Nights lingers long after this fool's paradise goes dark. Luan Gaines/ 2009.

I could not stop reading this book after a long day since 8 p.m. until 2 a.m.
I just had to find out the end!

though not very smooth at times in its transitions the book is something so universal: two people, passion, consequences, life after, greed for more in life, prejudice.

recommend.