Customer Reviews

War by Candlelight (P.S.)

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Globalization is a funny thing. Who would think that one of the best up and coming South American writers would be a Peruvian American from Birmingham, Alabama who writes in English. What makes him a South American is that Alarcon is a gifted chronicler of life in Lima, Peru. There is nothing nostalgic or romantacized about Alarcon's Lima. It's Lima, La Horrible. A grotesque, third world city that is for some odd reason is an almost charming city in its weirdness.

As an American going back to the city where he was born, Alarcon sees Lima in a way most Peruvians miss. Alarcon has no need for magic realism. Alarcon's protagonists are handyman thieves, unemployed bank clerks, dog killing revolutionaries and journalists who on occassion ride the city's buses dressed in clown outfits. Throw in a parade of shoe shine boys and a Senderista or two and you have that strange mix that is modern day Lima.

Alarcon's short stories are precise and well written. You can almost see the finger prints of the Iowa Writers Workshop. This is a very good first collection of short stories for a young writer. I am looking forward to seeing future books. It will be interesting to see whether he stays a South American writer or turns his talents to the Latino immigrant experience in the United States.

This slim book of stories has been touted as one of the best books of spring.

In "Third Avenue Suicide," a young American, David, lives with a woman of Indian descent in a Manhattan apartment. Her mother is set on having Reena marry a man of her own race, so Reena and David hide all traces of David's living with Reena whenever the mother pops over, which is quite a lot. "They had been living in the apartment for ten days when David was first asked to disappear." This would be a humorous in-law type tale except for a tragic development way out of left field which makes David feel like an exile from his own life.

In "Absence," a Peruvian painter called Wari is visiting New York where a show of his work is going up at a university-affiliated gallery. In flashback he contrasts the hopelessness of his life in Lima, with the marvels of Manhattan, and contemplates not going back, casting his fate to the winds of exile. His show is not well received and, as Daniel Alarcon describes his paintings, they are not memorable. Wari befriends the girlfriend of his American sponsor, a warmhearted woman called Leah, who attracts him with her efforts at intimacy.

Several of the stories take place in Latin America, where a revolution is going on. Perhaps the strongest of these is "Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979" in which a cadre of young rebels spends the night killing black dogs, each one representing a capitalist. When Lima runs out of stray black mutts, the narrator, Pintor, is charged with painting the not-quite black ones a more solid black. Alarcon makes heavy play out of the way that Lima's packs of feral dogs resemble the young men who want them dead. Pintor winds up having a confrontation with a well-meaning policeman that ends in an unhappy way.

"City of Clowns," which was first published in the prestigious magazine THE NEW YORKER, is the longest and most contrived of all the stories here. I can imagine many enjoying Alarcon's talents, but to appreciate WAR BY CANDLELIGHT, you will have to have a large tolerance for the kind of awkward symbolism that was popular in the heyday of Irwin Shaw. No magic realism here, just a dim way of looking at a world in chaos. Although young Alarcon holds an MFA from Iowa Writers Workshop, his style is not quite leaden, but something close to it. What's another word for "leaden" that's a bit less heavy? How about "Tinny?" "Wooden?" Anyhow, the book is no disaster, just a disappointment in the face of the campaign hype that promised us a new Salman Rushdie or Orhan Pamuk in our midst.

The stories in this debut collection are extraordinary. Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, raised in Alabama, spent time in Peru as a Fulbright scholar, and now lives in Oakland. Most of the stories in "War by Candlelight" are set in Peru; three take place in New York City. Whether writing about political instability in Lima or emotional turmoil in Manhattan, Alarcón writes with a kind of unobtrusive brilliance that is astonishing. I'd finish one of these stories, marvel at how awesome it was, only to find the next one even more brilliant.

"Third Avenue Suicide" (in which Reena, an Indian immigrant, keeps stalling on introducing her Peruvian boyfriend to her mother), "Lima. Peru. July 28" (a painter gets sucked into revolutionary violence), "A science for being alone" (Miguel learns that his former girl friend, the mother of his five-year old daughter, whom he has planned to propose to, intends to emigrate to the U.S.) were three of my favorites. All three are extraordinary, But they are eclipsed by the title story, and by "City of Clowns", probably the best short story I've read in the last five years.

It's not just the writing that is excellent. Whether it's a result of the insight that comes from the dual perspective of the emigrant, or a consequence of Alarcón's innate smartness, there is genuine wisdom in these wonderful, disturbing stories.

I highly recommend "War by Candlelight".

I read these a couple months ago and am still overwhelmed by these stories. I rarely like short stories, usually can't sustain interest to read a whole book of them - but these got me. Immediately. Daniel Alarcon is a brilliant, talented writer - everything THEY say about him is true. Each character in each short story is so vivid and real, so immediately compelling. Each short story tells a lifetime of a person and a chunk of history - in this case, of Peru, or Peruvian immigrants. THe stories and situations are complex and Alarcon refrains from making political judgments or pontifications. This is some of the most interesting stuff I've read in years, it's beautifully written, it's compelling and breathtaking. And having just read his recently published novel, Lost City Radio, I have to say - I like the short stories better. These are incredible. Don't miss 'em.

Jumping between the US and Peru, Daniel Alarcon's stories depict the harsh realities of life from an outside in perspective. My favorite stories in this collection are "City of Clowns" and "Third Ave Suicide."
Those who enjoy the writings of other 1st generation immigrants raised in the US such as Jhumpa Lahiri will enjoy the perspective that Daniel Alarcon brings.

"In Lima," writes Daniel Alarcón, "dying is the local sport." The same is true of the Peruvian countryside, where one of the author's characters loses his wife in a fantastic mudslide that inundates his entire village.

Alarcón's Peru is a hard place to make a life. Nearly all of the short stories in this collection catalog the war torn country's violence, its corruption and its lack of opportunity for able-bodied citizens. At the same time, there is a gentle nature about many of the author's protagonists, most of who are simply trying to make the best of a bad situation.

The majority of these stories take place in Lima, a city that contains a large penitentiary for terrorists and street thugs. The local kids refer to the facility as the University "because it's where you went when you finished high school." In Alarcón's first story, Flood, every moment - every breath it seems - is dominated by the neighborhood turf war, the threat of incarceration and worst of all, death at the hand of a rival gang.

For the author's story, Absence, the scene shifts to post 9/11 New York City, where Wari, a painter, is having a showing of his work. Before leaving Peru, the painter is warned by a friend to shave, lest security officials mistake him for an Arab. The reader follows his experience at the American Embassy in Lima Even there, his situation is made more difficult. Hoping to obtain a ninety-day stay, Wari finds he can only get a one-month tourist visa. After a meeting with an abrasive embassy agent, he is limited to two weeks out-of-country.

Daniel Alarcón writes with such an authentic voice that it's hard to imagine the lives of the people of Peru being any different that what he describes. All of the stories here bring a new tragedy - the loss of a loved one, or the story of a laid off bank employee, Miguel, who has been pleading with his girlfriend, the mother of their child, for her hand in marriage for five years. The woman loves Miguel but tells him but that she is not sure that that is enough. Miguel muses that "in this city, there is nothing more useless than imagining a life... There is no work," he complains.

Born in Lima and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Alarcón has written a beautiful, if sobering, collection of short stories. Strongly recommended for adult readers.

When asked to describe my country, Peru, most fellow countrymen say it is a country of contrasts. They have in mind its varied geography (deserts, high mountains and the Amazon jungle, now called `tropical rainforest' by prurient environmentalist trying to take distance from Conradian connotations), the rich gastronomy and profuse sartorial repertoires. But the biggest contrasts in the Inca's land do not reside in its many ecosystems, abundance of dishes in its restaurants' menus or the colorful clothing of many of its inhabitants, no. Its biggest contrast is the one that makes possible a coca-fed quechua-speaking peasant and a BMW-driving jet-setter inhabit the same political demarcation, so-called Peruvian nation, and hordes of destitute glue-inhaling children and private-beach goers dwelling -if that word is applicable-, probably a few blocks away from each other, in its capital city of Lima.

In a country like the US of A, lives evolve in a space of over-determined system of controls, a structure of power that finds its formal expression in myriad of laws, regulations, systems of surveillance, bureaucracies in charge of enforcement, etc. That's what keeps the ball rolling, the mechanisms of power well oiled. In this ambit, freedom is sold to the public as a right/entitlement to choose from vanilla or strawberry, Coke or Pepsi, Lexus or Mazda, Democratic or Republican, gay or straight, etc. So everybody is happy and the underlying structure of control and submission is never -or seldom- put in question.

How can you articulate such a thing, a sophisticated legal apparatus of regulation and control, in a country like Peru, in which people don't even have a common tongue, let alone a common culture or common social references? So, as long as the profound `contrast' -let's call it deep inequality, for the sake of accuracy- all institutional mechanisms of control in the realm of so-called `civil society' are doomed to break down: crime to become rampant, corruption widespread, guerrillas -`terrorism'- endemic. How the whole thing works, then? If you want to know the answer read Daniel Alarcon's War By Candlelight, a collection of short, explosive, kaleidoscopic stories, dealing -in the surface- with strong, anecdotic, even comic, circumstances and situations of all kinds but, deep down, lurking as a powerful undercurrent, with all the applicable mechanisms that make such an unbelievably unequal society possible. From the open use of force and violence, to racism inculcated from early age in children at their schools, Alarcon courageously traverses the darkest and most twisted corridors of socially imposed -socially accepted- practices of discrimination, humiliation, military-exercised violence and a myriad of others to perpetuate a status quo that to any foreign observer would appear obviously impossible. He gets into the souls of people, he shows us the deep anger beneath the surface, the rage-fueled rebellion, and the absurdly ritualistic, big and little revenges, as well as, friendship and love, like beautiful flowers improbably blossoming in the midst of putrid detritus. Alarcon captures a snapshot of a society divided at its very core, in a vertiginous state of flux in which one side tries to keep its privileges and the other side, in non-articulated ways perhaps, but relentlessly, rebels. The serene conviction of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, in Lampedusa's `The Leopard' "all needs to change for everything to remain the same", the lucidity of a need for reforms to prevent social collapse, is completely absent from the minds of the rich and privileged.

If you want to learn about how societies chronically in the verge of complete social anomie function, read Alarcon. Some of the same images are present in the first works of Vargas Llosa, mostly in `Conversation in the Cathedral', which Alarcon recommends, but the intensity, the rigorously articulated account of its subject matter, without `literary' embellishments, feel very new. Perhaps because Peru of today portrayed by Alarcon is a society much closer to the apocalypse than 50's Peru under the benevolent dictatorship of General Odria. Perhaps because he is a young man, part of a post baby-boom generation, with less proclivity to dishonest `artistry' and self-indulgence.

Also, to Alarcon's credit, he does not fall into the easy trap of dirty language, eschatological interchanges or `liberated', torrid descriptions of sexual situations, very trendy and perhaps very commercially profitable in contemporary Peruvian literature and cinema. After much applause and sycophancy Vargas Llosa's work ended up being a form of high-brow pornography for the Peruvian high classes and it appears his example was widely followed. I don't think Alarcon will go down the same path, you can tell he's wood from a different tree, grown up away (Oakland, California) from a home he misses, a people he tries to make sense of and a country he wants to come to terms with. Besides one or two profanities here and there and just a quick reference to sex once in a while, Alarcon keeps us focused on the horrors, he forces us to become witnesses of a new `Heart of Darkness', this time not up the river of a 19th century Belgian Congo but just steps away from home, in contemporary South America. Good job, Daniel!

These are nicely written stories by a promising young writer. I enjoyed the reading and highly recommend it. However, I felt that this style has been largely used by older Peruvian authors although perhaps rarely printed in English. Excesive "realism" should not be used as a main line. Yes, those things really happen in Peru, but we have read that before, it is not new. I think the author can do a lot better by focusing on the big plot (he makes them up really REALLY well) and not on ultrarealistic details.

As another reviewer notes here, yes, the "fingerprints of the Iowa Writers Workshop" are all over this debut collection, and others' too, judging from the number of people the author acknowledges. For a very young writer (born 1977), such acclaim as this slim volume has garnered shows that the power of the MFA and creative writing industry is driving what in earlier decades would have been energy more often harnessed and directed in isolation, perhaps with a few friends or mentors, but not dozens.

This fussiness lessens the power of these stories, the highlights of which have been summarized on Amazon. A knowledge of the bombing of La Frontera prison, of the Sendero terrorism that focused upon symbolic (dog hangings) and practical (power blackouts of the cities) actions, and of the devastating avalanche of 1970 heightens the contexts that Alarcon includes, but with the exception of the ambitious, if obvious in its motifs and themes, long story "City of Clowns," little feel for Lima emerges.

Instead, it's largely the same often self-pitying, well-worn, psychological terrain inhabited by so many contemporaries of Alarcon, who, given his bicultural and bilingual knowledge, should not settle so easily into. Rather, the flashes of insight evident as he sketches the emotional impact of exile, of alienation, and of resentment show more depth when juxtaposed against urban landscapes he apparently favors: New York City as well as Arequipa.

P.S. The subsequent Spanish translation, intriguingly, was not done by Daniel but by Renato Alarcon, evidently another family member, as "Guerra en la penumbra."

The postman delivered this book at noon. I picked it up, missed class, and was finished by five. 200 pages. You need to read this book. I can't say anything more. Read this book.

War by Candlelight: Stories (P.S.)