Things Fall Apart

Lima Nights - Marie Arana (Dial Press, 2009)

This slim novel is about one man - Carlos Bluhm - and two relationship crises, separated by twenty years. It's nicer to think of the first half as actually the coming together, the initiation of a relationship. But in light of the second part, Carlos and Maria twenty years later, the first starts to feel more like the dissolution of his marriage to Sophie.

Our cast: Carlos is of German descent, as is his wife and his group of friends, but he has fallen from the heights of wealth that his family once enjoyed. Maria is the young teen who beguiles him with her skin color, her dancing, her strange combination of innocence and knowingness. But there is also the wife, Sophie; the mother, Dorothea; the sons Fritz and Rudy; the men: Oscar, Willy, and Marco. And Maria's family. Arana keeps the book spare and focused, but the minor characters actually beg for more space - another author would have created a sprawling saga. (Yes, I still have Tolstoy on my mind.) And I might have preferred that book. This one - tight, sad - left me feeling as much hopeless as anything.