The past three decades brought civil war and torture to several countries in Central and South America, and left untold hundreds of thousands dead or simply "disappeared." Surviving relations of the disappeared, or the "desaparecidos," often say they'd rather know what happened to their loved ones, even if they've been killed, than live with the grueling day-to-day uncertainty.
Lost City Radio is set in a fictitious South American country reminiscent historically of Chile, Argentina, El Salvador and, especially, author Daniel Alarcon's native Peru. The novel begins 10 years after the end of the country's brutal civil war, in which the government triumphed over a tenacious rebellion. Tens of thousands of people are missing.
Hoping to locate missing husbands, wives, sons, daughters and friends, listeners tune in every Sunday evening to "Lost City Radio," "a program for missing people," broadcast from the capital city and hosted by a woman named Norma, whose husband Rey disappeared during the last year of the war. Norma attempts to reunite people with their missing loved ones, all the while longing to find her own husband, and the show soon becomes a national phenomenon.
"... 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."
One day, a 10-year-old boy named Victor, from the village where Norma's husband Rey had been working at the time of his disappearance, shows up at the station. He's been sent by the villagers with a list of names they want Norma to read on the air. When Norma realizes the list includes her husband's wartime pseudonym, Victor's life and hers become intertwined.
Alarcon weaves in various other stories in skillfully rendered flashbacks: Norma and Rey's meeting; his year in a government prison where anyone suspected of being part of the rebellion is tortured; the couple's marriage; her sudden popularity as a radio host; Rey's university career and his trips into the jungle where his scientific research often morphs into revolutionary activity.
Eventually, Norma and Victor travel to the boy's village, where Norma finds out what happened to her husband. But Lost City Radio delivers more than a personal mystery that's solved within 300 pages. The author's portrait of the country itself, and how civil war changed the nature of its people's lives, is a spellbinding tour de force not soon forgotten. His prose is energetic, at times almost euphoric in its descriptions. The pages fill with startling images of war's vileness, balanced by Alarcon's empathy for his characters -- these people whose hope endures in spite of everything, and who emerge fully developed from his discerning gaze into their inner lives.
In the end, this first novel by Alarcon, who was brought to the United States by his parents when they escaped the political violence of Peru, is about war itself. It's also about how people whose lives and homes are ruined by conflict nonetheless continue living, taking one step after another, joining with others doing the same, and eventually regaining enough pride and humanity to start a whole new cycle of common dreams of a free, peaceful life.
Rash, who teaches at Western Carolina, returns to the short story form after writing three critically praised novels (One Foot In Eden, Saints At The River, The World Made Straight). His consistent theme, the uneasy (at best) collision of the old and new South, of the ancient and the modern, remains intact. The 13 stories span the 20th century in Appalachia and, when Rash is at his best, take on the power of myths.
Three old men look for a fabled giant sturgeon in order to get a leg up on a know-it-all game warden; a high school hoops star whose drug use wrecked his chance at the pros comes back to the town playground; an English professor, at his wife's urging, dates a woman who has placed a personal ad in a local paper. In the title story, a chemistry teacher suffering from depression seeks solace in the rough-and-tumble, tongues-speaking religious rites of his youth. And in the collection's strongest, richest story, "Pemberton's Bride" -- which Rash is expanding into his next novel -- the Boston bride of a lumber mill owner gradually and ruthlessly gains control in her new town.
Some of the stories' endings are too abrupt or too pat, but overall, this is a very good collection from one of the South's best new writers.
Lost City Radio
by Daniel AlarconHarperCollins, 272 pages, $24.95
Chemistry and Other Stories
by Ron RashPicador, 240 pages, $13