Lost City Radio (Hardcover)

~ Daniel Alarcon (Author)
Key Phrases: wrinkled suit, Miss Norma, Don Zahir, Central Highway (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in a fictional South American nation where guerrillas have long clashed with the government, Alarcón's ambitious first novel (after the story collection War by Candlelight) follows a trio of characters upended by civil strife. Norma, whose husband, Rey, disappeared 10 years ago after the end of a civil war, hosts popular radio show Lost City Radio, which reconnects callers with their missing loved ones. (She quietly entertains the notion that the job will also reunite her with her missing husband.) So when an 11-year-old orphan, Victor, shows up at the radio station with a list of his distant village's "lost people," the station plans a special show dedicated to his case and cranks up its promotional machine. Norma, meanwhile, notices a name on the list that's an alias her husband used to use, prompting her to resume her quest to find him. She and Victor travel to Victor's home village, where local teacher Manau reveals to Norma what she's long feared—and more. Though the mystery Alarcón makes of the identity of Victor's father isn't particularly mysterious, this misstep is overshadowed by Alarcón's successful and nimbly handled portrayal of war's lingering consequences. (Feb.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Daniel Alarcón's thoughtful, engaging first novel is set in a fictitious South American country where the reader will immediately recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Alarcón's native country, Peru. No name is ever given to the country: Alarcón means the novel to be a fable about civil wars and their repercussions, rather than an account of a specific war within a specific place to which we bring all the baggage of familiarity.

With the publication of Lost City Radio, Alarcón is off and running. His collection of short stories, War by Candlelight, was published two years ago to deservedly high praise. Now still in his late 20s, Alarcón has an impressive and rather unusual background. He was brought to this country when he was very young because of the dreadful violence that swept through Peru in the 1980s and '90s during the terrorist uprisings led by the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru movements. In recent years, he has spent a lot of time in one of the poorest barrios of Lima, and much of his fiction is about the people who live there.

As Lost City Radio begins, the war of almost a decade between the country's government and the terrorist group known as IL has at last ended, with a crushing victory by the government. All over the country, people are missing, their fates a mystery. In hopes of finding the ones they have lost, people turn each Sunday night to a program on the only radio station permitted to remain on the air in the capital city. It is called "Lost City Radio," "a program for missing people," and its host is a woman named Norma:

"Every Sunday night, for an hour, since the last year of the war, Norma took calls from people who imagined she had special powers, that she was mantic and all-seeing, able to pluck the lost, estranged, and missing from the moldering city. Strangers addressed her by her first name and pleaded to be heard. . . . With her prodding, the callers revisited village life and all that had been left behind, inviting their lost people to remember with them: Are you there, brother? And Norma listened, and then repeated the names in her mellifluous voice, and the board would light up with calls, lonely red lights, people longing to be found."

Norma, who is in her early 40s, sees the program as a service to the country's lost but also as a way of looking for her husband, Rey, who had been involved with IL and disappeared nine years ago from a jungle village. Now a boy from that village, a "quiet and thin" 11-year-old named Victor, has shown up at the station with a list of names that the villagers want Norma to read on the air: the names of the lost, one of which turns out to be the pseudonym that Rey had used in the jungle in hopes of shielding himself from government scrutiny.

At this point, the novel begins its steady movement backward and forward in time: to the chance meeting of Norma and Rey many years ago and his arrest that same night; his agonizing year at a desolate place known only as the Moon, where soldiers and government agents imprison and torture IL members, actual or suspected; their loving but childless marriage; her rise at the radio station and his at the university; his regular disappearances into the jungle, for scientific research but also for revolutionary activity the precise nature of which Norma never knows.

The arrival of the boy is what sets all this off. He knows nothing of his father -- presumably he is yet another of the lost -- and his mother drowned only three days ago: "Since then, his life had acquired a velocity he could scarcely comprehend. Everything was out of order, the contents of his world spilled and artlessly rearranged." Now he has nowhere to go, so Norma's boss tells her to take him. At first, they are guarded with each other, but gradually a measure of warmth develops between them. Gradually, too, events occur that bring Norma closer to an understanding of her husband's fate and of the complex legacy he has left her.

These are all interesting and appealing characters who emerge as discrete human beings rather than mere cardboard representations of certain inescapable Latin American social and political realities. Still, the dominant character in the novel is not its protagonist, Norma, but the war itself. Its malign effects are felt everywhere, from the anonymous hamlets of the jungle and mountains to the wealthy neighborhoods of the capital and its sprawling barrios, acre upon acre of shacks steadily climbing up the bleak hills surrounding the city as more and more people flee there from the beautiful but violent countryside.

Alarcón's sympathies obviously are with the country's poor and dispossessed, as should be those of anyone who knows about the poverty and discrimination with which Latin America is afflicted, but he declines to choose sides in the violent conflict. Alarcón excoriates the government, "a blind machine" with "its myopic bureaucracy, its radical incompetence," its brutal treatment of everyone who falls into its grasp, but he is even harsher on the IL, with its "coordinated attacks on the more vulnerable symbols of government power," its "campaign of propaganda that included the infiltration of newspapers and radio stations," its "kidnappings and ransoms, in order to finance the purchase of weapons and explosives facilitated by supporters abroad." He asks what it all means and says:

"Consider the improbability of it: that the multiple complaints of a people could somehow coalesce and find expression in an act -- in any act -- of violence. What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? . . . The war had become, if it wasn't from the very beginning, an indecipherable text. The country had slipped, fallen into a nightmare, now horrifying, now comic, and in the city, there was only a sense of dismay at the inexplicability of it. Had it begun with a voided election? Or the murder of a popular senator? Who could remember now? . . . Even [nine years ago] anyone paying attention should have known what was coming. But they had stepped together into this chaos, the insurgency and the government, arm in arm, and for nine violent years, they'd danced."

Alarcón has done his homework well. Those words express, eloquently and exactly, the self-destructiveness of violent insurgency and official retaliation. The victims are the people whom the revolution ostensibly aims to serve. This has been true in just about every actual country in Latin America, as it is true in the fictional one that Alarcón has invented. Lost City Radio is a fable for an entire continent, and is no less pertinent in other parts of the world where different languages are spoken in different climates but where the same ruinous dance is played out.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060594799
• ISBN-13: 978-0060594794
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #566,964 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The War that Haunts Daniel Alarcon, July 13, 2007

By	Marco Antonio Abarca (Colorado) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth your time, February 13, 2007

By	Newton Munnow "Newton Munnow" (Atlanta, Georgia) - See all my reviews

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting first novel, February 23, 2007

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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 ([...])