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Lost City Radio

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Lost City Radio tells the story of a country, not unlike Peru, recovering from a long and divisive civil war between the government and a grass roots terrorist organization. Alarcon uses the structure of a family to narrate his story, not that the family is vaguely regular, consisting of lovers and children, unknowing wives and husbands leading more than one life. It is, in many ways, as much of a parable as anything, but Alarcon is a sharp, intelligent writer. You may well guess the secrets of the plot, but Alarcon isn't concerned as much with the secrets, but the banality behind them and the anguish that they cause. The novel is highly fragmented, jumping in location, time, narrator, but it's to Alarcon's credit that it's easy to follow, fluid. All in all, it's an impressive piece of work, welded together by a melancholy mixture of silence and memory. Definitely, worth your time.

In a world riven by sectarian violence and stalked by ethnic tension and the conflict it spawns, it's all too tempting simply to turn away from stark images of terrorist bombings or to flick the remote control to revel in the story of the latest celebrity embarrassment. In his quietly haunting first novel, LOST CITY RADIO, Peruvian-born American writer and author of the widely-praised short story collection WAR BY CANDLELIGHT, Daniel Alarcón, forces us to confront the inhumanity of these conflicts and the toll they exact on both participants and bystanders.

LOST CITY RADIO is set in an unnamed South American country a decade after the government has crushed the 10-year-long rebellion of a group of insurgents dubbed the "Illegitimate Legion." The war's inciting grievance, if there was one, was soon forgotten and yet the battles raged on, devastating urban neighborhoods and depopulating the towns and villages that dot the countryside. Rey, one of the novel's main characters, muses that the war "would have happened anyway. It was unavoidable. It's a way of life in a country like ours."

Rey is an "ethobotanist committed to the preservation of disappearing plant species." Near the end of the conflict he vanishes in the vicinity of a jungle village renamed "1797," as part of a government program to eradicate vestiges of local history by replacing traditional place names with numbers. Each Sunday night his widow, Norma, hosts a wildly popular program entitled "Lost City Radio" on the government-owned radio station during which she fields calls from people looking for missing family members, many of them victims of the political violence and others simply erased from the lives of their loved ones by the country's advancing urbanization. Her voice, "gold that stank of empathy," in the words of her station manager Elmer, snakes out over the city and the program sometimes results in reunions that become occasions for popular celebrations. In all the years she's hosted the show, Norma has never abandoned hope that someday it will serve as the vehicle for a reunion with Rey.

Norma's life as the "mother to an imaginary nation of missing people" is disrupted irretrievably when a young boy named Victor, a refugee from 1797 whose mother recently has drowned, appears at the station clutching a list of the disappeared compiled by his fellow villagers. Even more unsettling to Norma than the fact that Victor comes from the remote village where Rey was last seen is the appearance on the list of an assumed name under which her late husband carried out clandestine political activities. Despite a seemingly happy marriage to Rey, Norma knew little of these activities and even less of what her husband did on his frequent trips, ostensibly for scientific research, into the jungle.

Slowly and seductively, Alarcón peels away the layers of Rey's double life. The night he and Norma meet he's imprisoned and tortured at a prison called the "Moon." A year later, they reunite and soon are married. Eventually, Rey is recruited by a man in a rumpled suit to act as a secret courier, but the novel hints at a much deeper involvement in terrorist activities, something that creates an unbridgeable distance between him and Norma.

Childless herself, Norma becomes by default Victor's parent. Elijah Manau, Victor's teacher and his mother's lover, who accompanies the boy to the city and initially abandons him, rejoins Norma and Victor and the three unite in an odyssey across the urban landscape. Norma learns a secret about Rey even more stunning than any revelation of his political activities.

Like radio dial flickering between distant stations, LOST CITY RADIO moves seamlessly from Norma's life in the postwar capital city, to her relationship with Rey, and on to glimpses of life in 1797, separated from the capital not merely by distance, but by a vast cultural gulf. Though the scenes it depicts give the novel a distinctly Latin American atmosphere, Alarcon himself, in a 2005 interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, acknowledged, "if I were Pakistani or Kenyan, I could probably be writing a similar novel." He's acutely aware of the novel's universal themes: "What does a car bomb say about poverty," he writes, "or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement?"

Alarcón's prose is elliptical and dreamlike, aptly suited to the mysterious spell he weaves in LOST CITY RADIO. It's a novel that whispers, rather than shouts, for our attention, and it's all the more powerful and moving for that fact.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg ([...])

In the early 1980's, Daniel Alarcon's family fled the rising political violence in Peru and began a new life in a leafy, suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Alarcon's comfortable childhood was spent far away from the terrible violence that was to eventually claim over 60,000 victims. One of those victims was Alarcon's uncle, a well respected college professor who was kidnapped and never heard from again. Although, Alarcon's immediate family sat out the war in the United States, it nevertheless still haunts him and serves as the inspiration for many of Alarcon's short stories in his execellent first book, "War by Candlelight" and is at the front and center of his debut novel, "Lost City Radio."

Sendero Luminoso's often times bizarre campaign to bring down the Peruvian State has been well documented in a number of non-fiction books. It is fairly easy to chronicle the War's story of terrorist bombings, blackouts, army massacres and political assasinations. However, there is another human truth of that conflict that requires the skill and insight of the novelist. I lived in Peru during the mid 1980's and experienced many of the events that are thinly veiled in this story. Through the medium of the novel, Alarcon has been able to successfully recreate the atmosphere and tension that existed at the time. This novel beautifully captures the devestation that survives the end of a long and dirty war.

Finally, it is a sweet oddity of globalization that one of the emerging voices of Latin American literature is a child of the suburbs of Alabama. "Lost City Radio" is an impressive debut novel and is highly recommended.

In the late 1980s, I served as a Marine Corps recruiter in South Texas where it was my goal to enlist three recruits a month into the armed forces. At the time, "making mission" was all that mattered to me since I knew the Corps would take good care of my enlistees once they entered boot camp.

Then came the first Gulf War, and I started getting phone calls from parents worried about their sons and daughters. Questions such as "Have you heard from Anthony?" "Do you think Maria will have to spend nights in a foxhole?" And the question "Will they all come back home safe?" assaulted me during the day and haunted me at night.

The calls brought back carefree images of teenagers, eager to serve their country, who now faced the possibility of coming home in body bags. These names, and many more, crept back into my consciousness as I read Daniel Alarcón's mesmerizing debut novel, "Lost City Radio."

Alarcón, a Peruvian native who lives in Oakland, where he teaches at Mills College, weaves a harrowing tale of guerrilla warfare in an unnamed South American country that focuses on the devastation inflicted on the lives of family members who are left behind to wonder, worry and weep about loved ones fighting in a conflict in which no one really knows who's right or wrong, or worse yet, how it will all end, if ever.

While the war is the epicenter of the novel, we view it through the lives of three principles who try to make sense of the turmoil the insurgency has dumped upon their lives. Each tries to find answers in the chaos the fighting has brought to their town and village, but with the fog of war prevalent, they seemingly settle on adapting, surviving, and praying for any kind of closure to the mayhem.

Norma, the central character, is the host of a national radio program, "Lost City Radio." For years, her voice, which her producer once described as "gold that stank of empathy," is the sole source of consolation to a country seeking to find loved ones who left, or were abducted, from their homes to fight, only to never be seen again. Unbeknownst to her audience, her husband is one of the missing.

"Welcome to Lost City Radio ... To all the listeners, a warm greeting this evening, my name is Norma ... Call us now, and tell us who you're looking for. Who can we help you find? Is it a brother you're missing? A lover? A mother or father, an uncle or a childhood friend? We're listening, I'm listening ... Call now, tell us your story." And then, night after night, she reads lists of names sent in by callers hoping to find the missing the war has claimed.

Such is the life Norma leads for a decade until one day, a 10-year-old boy from a jungle village now called 1797 shows up at the radio station with a list of names that contains one she has longed to read on the air but can't due to governmental oversight -- the one that belongs to her long absent spouse. Who, Norma wonders, put that name on the list and what other clues does the boy and the man who accompanied him out of the jungle have that can lead to a reunion with her husband?

Alarcón, a Whiting Award winner and PEN/Hemingway Award finalist for his 2005 short story collection "War By Candlelight," eloquently probes the ramifications of war on the home front from a perspective that can be overlooked if one doesn't have a family member in arms. He tenderly reveals the impact of war on society and the emotional wounds on humanity that sometimes never heal. Alarcón painstakingly reminds us that soldiers don't go into skirmishes alone; they take with them loved ones who yearn for an embrace and the chance to utter their names upon safe passage home.

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.

Why Norma? "She was a natural: She knew when to let her voice waver, when to linger on a word, what texts to tear through and read as if the words themselves were on fire."

Norma's unctuous boss, Elmer, wants high ratings without angering those in power. Government authorities are more than willing to make radio employees disappear if they seem to sympathize with the Illegitimate Legion, a guerrilla faction based in the nation's mountains and jungles. Though the war with the IL is technically over, suspicion and distrust are ingrained in the nation's psyche.

Norma is no stranger to loss. She nurses the hope of finding her husband, Rey, who disappeared 10 years earlier.

Rey, an ethnobotanist, would leave Norma for long stretches to venture into the jungle, ostensibly to study indigenous remedies. With cities and villages stripped of their original names, Rey often visited "Village 1797." He failed to return home after one such foray. Rey's covert jungle activities as an IL sympathizer has convinced Norma that the government is responsible for her husband's disappearance.

One day, a village boy, Victor, is brought to the radio station to meet Norma. "He was slender and fragile, and his eyes were too small for his face. His head had been shaved -- to kill lice, Norma supposed." The boy carries a letter from the residents of Village 1797, who pooled their money to send Victor to the city for a "better life." The letter includes a list of lost people, some of whom may have fled to the city. "Perhaps one of these individuals will be able to care for the boy," says the letter.

The list of names includes one Norma recognizes: an IL pseudonym once used by Rey. Could Victor be Norma's last and best chance of finding her husband?

Norma and Rey share the stage with unforgettable characters whose histories connect in compelling and poignant ways. Manau, the village schoolteacher who takes Victor to see Norma, is a man whose body is covered with sores from his life in the humid jungle, a man who enjoyed a too-brief romance with Victor's late mother, Adela. And there's Zahir, another resident of Village 1797, whose hands were hacked off by zealous members of the IL. Though falsely accused of stealing food, Zahir accepts his punishment because of other evil things he has done.

Alarcón's narrative has the ebb and flow of a dark dream. With a fluid chronology that curves upon itself and doubles back effortlessly, he allows the past to mingle and compete with the present. There are no false steps or strained sentences. "Lost City Radio" is, quite simply, a triumph. Alarcón has created a sublimely terrifying, war-ravaged world populated by unforgettable and fully realized characters. But at the novel's core is a story of hope, one that renders the resiliency of human nature in all its imperfect glory.

[This review first appeared in the El Paso Times]

Daniel Alarcon's "Lost City Radio" is a transporting, evocative, richly poignant depiction of the chaos of war. What is most surprising about it is that it lacks every cliche of what you might think a "war" novel is about. The protagonist is a female radio host, Norma, who becomes an unexpected surrogate mother to a young boy. He has heard her radio show in the remote village in which he grew up, the weekly reading of "names of the lost" acting as a beacon for people looking for missing loved ones. The boy sets off to the city to meet the woman after his mother is killed. Their relationship in the present contrasts with flashbacks from their previous lives: hers as the wife of a political dissident (now missing) and his as a boy in a jungle town. We also learn quite a bit about Rey, Norma's missing husband.

The prose here is top notch. Sights and smells come alive; the reader is taken away to a world you may know little about but will come to understand deeply. This is a very good novel, worth seeking out.

I was astonished by this novel. I thought it started off a bit slow, I thought the main characters Norma and Rey a bit dull at first, and some of the main plot twists were foreseeable. But even if the main characters didn't enthrall at first, many of the secondary ones did. Adela, Trini, Rey`s father and even the ambiguous Zahir and Manau are touchingly rendered. For me, the book really started to pick up during the first full chapter in "1797" - the jungle village were key events involving Adela and and her son Victor happen. But towards the final chapters the tension builds and even Norma and Rey grow in humanity: the last chapter in particular is devastating. The at times semi journalistic style with which the wartime events are described is also very effective.

All in all, this was a fantastic book. I look forward to more by Alarcon. Readers who enjoyed this book are encouraged to try Nathan Englander's "The Ministry of Special Cases" - an equally engaging, impecabbly written and emotionally gripping novel set in somewhat similar context of Latin American political instability.

Alarcon's debut novel takes us on a riveting literary trek which places a propagandist disc jockey akin to Tokyo Rose in a double-speak environment reminiscent of George Orwell's "1984." What I liked best is the way that the story-line lays naked the rhetoric filled propaganda machines of the political left and right. Popular movements frequently arise for reasons of political and economic injustices. Yet the power pundits behind the scenes coopt the populist fervor and use whatever propagada tactics necessary to ensure their domination.

It is rare to come across someone like Alarcon who can so naturally combine unpretentious prose with a drivingly poignant and original story line.

Set in an unspecified South American country, "a nation at the edge of the world, a make-believe country outside history", people are still reeling after ten years of war between the government and guerillas, their spirits broken by incessant violence, legions of the disappeared unaccounted for. In one small place of hope, the Indians in the mountains and the poor of the barrio listen with rapt attention to Lost City Radio. The voice of consolation to her devastated listeners, Norma reads lists, the endless names of the missing, hopeful that some may be reunited with their families. But in the last year of the long absence of her husband, Rey, one of the missing, Norma's advancing grief and impending hopelessness has grown burdensome, the expectations of the audience weighing on her every waking moment.

Hugely popular, Lost City Radio flourishes in spite of a repressive government, spies everywhere, questions rebuffed by officials who allow no independence of thought. The prisons are filled with the captured insurrectionists, their leaders all but buried in the smothering confines of underground cells. Norma hopes to find Rey in one of these prisons, but it is impossible to discern him in a sea of gaunt, determined faces. Other than his profession as an ethnobiologist, Norma has no idea of Rey's other interests, his life carefully compartmentalized. They met under romantic, mysterious conditions, Rey hinting at a more obscure identity. By the time they are married, Norma accepts her husband's eccentricities; but when he fails to return from the jungle village 1797 (names have been replaced by numbers), Norma has no way to track his activities or learn of his fate.

Then one day, ten years after the end of the war, his teacher delivers a young boy to the radio station, eleven-year-old Vincent from village 1787, perhaps a key to Rey's location. Certainly, as time and events unfold, Norma is confronted with the unthinkable: "She had a husband, he was dead or gone... the war had ended, or perhaps it had never begun." Norma's memories are fresh, alive with the spirits of the lost, some of the names still too dangerous to mention on the air. Wracked by loss, clinging to the child, Norma blindly navigates the present, the forbidden names whispered into the dark night. The emotional journey of a grieving wife and an innocent orphan permeate the novel, their stories shadowed by Rey's duplicitous past and devotion to his wife. This otherworldly tale of strength in the face of a confusing war speaks to the vital issues of out time. Such a scenario no longer seems the stuff of fantasy, given the human faces of these poignant characters, Alarcon's novel a grim reminder: "People disappear, they vanish. And with them the history, so that new myths replace the old." Luan Gaines/2007.

BOOKPAGE noted that Daniel Alarcon's debut novel "Lost City Radio" is "a somber, moving elegy to all souls similarly erased or displaced by war, poverty or ideology." His short-story collection, War by Candlelight: Stories (P.S.), was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway prize. Perhaps you've also read reviews comparing "Lost City Radio" to George Orwell's "1984," thanks to both books' fictional mirrors to reality. So, you think, does the book live up to the hype?

You better believe it. Daniel Alarcon is for real. Spend a little time reading (or should it be listening?) to "Lost City Radio." You won't be disappointed.