Lost City Radio

Sad. I am feeling sad right now. Why? Not sure, but I partly blame Daniel Alarcon.

Such a pretty day, so I went out to walk some errands, and ended up drinking chai at Synergy Cafe. Which is where I finished Lost City Radio by the aforementioned Alarcon, a Peruvian transplant to Oakland.

The novel is set in the capital city of a nameless Latin American country, still recovering from a bruising civil war. The central theme of the novel is memory and the struggle to remember against an authoritarian government that is determined to disappear the past. Towns are renamed (actually, renumbered) and the missing seem to number in the tens of thousands.

In the midst of this Norma hosts "Lost City Radio," a weekly program that allows people to share their memories of missing loved ones, and reunites a lucky few who lost one another in the war and mass in-migration to the city. Oh, and Norma also has her own missing: her husband, who disappeared in the jungle shortly after the war ended and who may have been working with the rebels. But he, he remains nameless.

Alarcon weaves together tales from Norma, her husband, the child that appears at the station one day, his cowardly teacher, and a man who ruined other lives and had his own ruined all by accident. They run forward and backwards in time, and you're often trying to place yourself. Is this the present? Right after the war? Before the war? In its midst? City or jungle? The effect is disorienting, but so in many ways are the characters' lives.

What struck me most was the way that simple actions in the novel trigger a string of events that had unforeseen and tragic consequences. And Alarcon shows us the consequences well before delving back to the causes. The cumulative effect is powerful, and troubling. Or, like I said at the beginning of this post, sad.