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"Lost City Radio is indeed a wrenching commentary on the devastation war can inflict. But the mystery at the heart of this story is not political — it's a riddle of the human heart." Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
A powerful and searing novel of three lives fractured by a civil war.
For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war.
But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.
Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer, and survivor carries for years after. This tender debut marks Alarcón's emergence as a major new voice in American fiction.
Review:
"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"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, Alarcon's native country, Peru. No name is ever given to the country: Alarcon means the novel to be a fable about civil wars and their repercussions, rather than an account of a specific... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) war within a specific place to which we bring all the baggage of familiarity. With the publication of 'Lost City Radio,' Alarcon 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, Alarcon 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 governments 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. Alarcon'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. Alarcon 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.' Alarcon 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 Alarcon 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. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail is yardleyj(at)washpost.com." Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)
Review:
"Literature is fortunate to have such a promising, thought-provoking young writer." Library Journal
Review:
"Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness in both jungle and city, creating indelible images that concentrate the horrors of war, and unerringly articulating the complex feelings of individuals caught in barbaric and senseless predicaments, Alarcón reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:
"Alarcón has mapped a whole nation and given its war-torn history real depth — an impressive feat." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Few first-time novelists skillfully pursue so many separate intentions — history, mystery, cautionary tale — or manage to coordinate their simultaneous unfolding. Lost City Radio is a bravura performance." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"There were moments while I was lost in [this] wonderfully imagined world...that I felt as though I were reading a novel by the...marvelous Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. I mean that as a compliment and as a writer's, as well as a critic's, doff of the hat." Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
"Alarcón painstakingly reminds us that soldiers don't go into skirmishes alone; they take with them loved ones who yearn for an embrace and the chance to utter their names upon safe passage home." San Antonio Express-News
Review:
"[A]n impressive debut novel from Alarcón, who effortlessly moves between the emotional longing Norma lives with for years and the violent political power-struggle waged between the government and its opposing guerilla factions." Rocky Mountain News
Review:
"In the end, if Lost City Radio doesn't come together as the full realization of Alarcón's genius, it's simply because he himself is guilty of setting the bar so high." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Daniel Alarcón's story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award. He is the associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine published in his native Lima, Peru. He lives in Oakland, California.
With the publication two years ago of his short-story collection "War by Candlelight" (HarperCollins), Daniel Alarcón received critical acclaim that included comparisons to Mario Vargas Llosa, Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway.
Born in Peru and living in northern California, Alarcón unflinchingly portrays people battered by civil strife, natural disasters and governmental abuses. He now brings us his first novel, "Lost City Radio" (HarperCollins, hardcover $24.95), a potent, disturbing, but, in the end, hopeful portrait of a nation torn by years of war and betrayal.
Set in an unnamed South American country, Alarcón's novel centers on Norma, the host of a popular program, "Lost City Radio," in which she reads the names of missing persons and lends an understanding ear to callers who hope she can help them reunite with lost loved ones. Norma has become a celebrity, a voice everyone knows, the apolitical salve for a nation that has lost too much.
Why Norma? "She was a natural: She knew when to let her voice waver, when to linger on a word, what texts to tear through and read as if the words themselves were on fire."
Norma's unctuous boss, Elmer, wants high ratings without angering those in power. Government authorities are more than willing to make radio employees disappear if they seem to sympathize with the Illegitimate Legion, a guerrilla faction based in the nation's mountains and jungles. Though the war with the IL is technically over, suspicion and distrust are ingrained in the nation's psyche.
Norma is no stranger to loss. She nurses the hope of finding her husband, Rey, who disappeared 10 years earlier.
Rey, an ethnobotanist, would leave Norma for long stretches to venture into the jungle, ostensibly to study indigenous remedies. With cities and villages stripped of their original names, Rey often visited "Village 1797." He failed to return home after one such foray. Rey's covert jungle activities as an IL sympathizer has convinced Norma that the government is responsible for her husband's disappearance.
One day, a village boy, Victor, is brought to the radio station to meet Norma. "He was slender and fragile, and his eyes were too small for his face. His head had been shaved -- to kill lice, Norma supposed." The boy carries a letter from the residents of Village 1797, who pooled their money to send Victor to the city for a "better life." The letter includes a list of lost people, some of whom may have fled to the city. "Perhaps one of these individuals will be able to care for the boy," says the letter.
The list of names includes one Norma recognizes: an IL pseudonym once used by Rey. Could Victor be Norma's last and best chance of finding her husband?
Norma and Rey share the stage with unforgettable characters whose histories connect in compelling and poignant ways. Manau, the village schoolteacher who takes Victor to see Norma, is a man whose body is covered with sores from his life in the humid jungle, a man who enjoyed a too-brief romance with Victor's late mother, Adela. And there's Zahir, another resident of Village 1797, whose hands were hacked off by zealous members of the IL. Though falsely accused of stealing food, Zahir accepts his punishment because of other evil things he has done.
Alarcón's narrative has the ebb and flow of a dark dream. With a fluid chronology that curves upon itself and doubles back effortlessly, he allows the past to mingle and compete with the present. There are no false steps or strained sentences. "Lost City Radio" is, quite simply, a triumph. Alarcón has created a sublimely terrifying, war-ravaged world populated by unforgettable and fully realized characters. But at the novel's core is a story of hope, one that renders the resiliency of human nature in all its imperfect glory.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (22 of 39 readers found this comment helpful)
swange, February 22, 2007 (view all comments by swange)
As much as I love David Letterman,I hate falling asleep on the sofa waiting the see the musical guest.I need a book that draws me into my cozy bed with my reading glasses -every night.I read "Lost City Radio" slowly,so I could savor and enjoy as long as possible.
I like a book that has a few words that I turn to the dictionary for.And enjoy being delighted to find that the unknown word is a perfect word.
Who to pass this book along to? My sister who recently visited Lima? My senior friend who enjoys reading history and politics? My neighbor who spent part of her childhood in South America? My best friend who just got dumped by her boyfriend? My co-worker who gave me "The Shadow of the Wind" to read? My lover who likes to read Nelson DeMille and Harlan Coben? My buddy active in the ACLU?
I'll share it with all of them.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (19 of 35 readers found this comment helpful)
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by 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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review A Day"
by Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor,
"Lost City Radio is indeed a wrenching commentary on the devastation war can inflict. But the mystery at the heart of this story is not political — it's a riddle of the human heart." (read the entire CSM review)
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"Literature is fortunate to have such a promising, thought-provoking young writer."
"Review"
by Booklist (Starred Review),
"Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness in both jungle and city, creating indelible images that concentrate the horrors of war, and unerringly articulating the complex feelings of individuals caught in barbaric and senseless predicaments, Alarcón reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"Alarcón has mapped a whole nation and given its war-torn history real depth — an impressive feat."
"Review"
by Los Angeles Times,
"Few first-time novelists skillfully pursue so many separate intentions — history, mystery, cautionary tale — or manage to coordinate their simultaneous unfolding. Lost City Radio is a bravura performance."
"Review"
by Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle,
"There were moments while I was lost in [this] wonderfully imagined world...that I felt as though I were reading a novel by the...marvelous Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. I mean that as a compliment and as a writer's, as well as a critic's, doff of the hat."
"Review"
by San Antonio Express-News,
"Alarcón painstakingly reminds us that soldiers don't go into skirmishes alone; they take with them loved ones who yearn for an embrace and the chance to utter their names upon safe passage home."
"Review"
by Rocky Mountain News,
"[A]n impressive debut novel from Alarcón, who effortlessly moves between the emotional longing Norma lives with for years and the violent political power-struggle waged between the government and its opposing guerilla factions."
"Review"
by Minneapolis Star Tribune,
"In the end, if Lost City Radio doesn't come together as the full realization of Alarcón's genius, it's simply because he himself is guilty of setting the bar so high."
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