Lost City Radio

I read this book some time ago but just now I was searching for more of Alarcon's work. A work of fiction that somehow resonated tremendously with what victims have said and people have lived in places like Colombia, El Salvador, Argentina, and surely Peru. The Spanish translation was also especially good! I credit this book and Francisco Goldman's Art of Political Murder for helping me to better understand the Latin America I live in as a visitor.

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.

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.

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

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