When I finish a book that has created a world for me, I get a little dazed and dreamy. Like I'm in love. It's this intense satisfaction, and a tiny effort to hold onto it instead of letting it go and returning to reality. For a long time I wondered if I was the only one who felt this way - but I saw a friend do so last week as he finished Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer) and happily realized I am not alone.
Usually I wait at least a few hours after finishing a book before starting my review, but I am still clutching at the feel, and thinking that writing about Heyday will help. I couldn't tell you how Kurt Andersen's novel made it on my list of books to read. (I sometimes think that books just magically appear on there, but no mind.) Normally I wouldn't expect a novel about mid-nineteenth-century America to appeal to me, but this one involved a "band of brothers" and their quest for a beautiful woman, and hell, I like that. And then Andersen drew me into the complicated and fantastical world of 1848 and 1849 - years of European revolution and counter-revolution, and an American rush for gold in my favorite of states.
Our central hero is Ben Knowles, Londoner transplanted to the land of his adventuresome dreams. But there is also Duff and Polly Lucking - he a soldier with a secret, she his actress (and more) sister - and Renaissance man Timothy Skaggs. Ben's immediately infatuation with Polly forms the heart of the plot. But the central theme is that of discovery and creation - and its converse. America is being born and torn down all at once - even then a land without history. And each character (oh, and there are more that the central four) has his or her own obsessions that relate to creation and destruction. But it's a theme that fits so well with that period in time that it doesn't seem overbearing - even at its most explicit.
My quibble with Heyday is the name-dropping. Of course Knowles is related to Toqueville and Skaggs used to write about Lincoln when he was a small-town lawyer and the group would run into attendees of the Seneca Falls Convention and ... well, you get the point. It's a little out of control. I understand that Andersen is trying to make clear exactly how free-wheeling and eventful and wild this period was, but I could have done with a few fewer references.
What I loved - California. The Golden State, even before it was a state. Andersen refers to the "topsy-turvy summer of '48" in California, and it's an apt term. American exceptionalism runs rampant, and I get bored of it, but I never tire of Californian exceptionalism. I am a snob. :) Even 150 years ago, a magnet for dreamers.
Showing posts with label Latin America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Latin America. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Saturday, June 02, 2007
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
