Lost City Radio
Daniel Alarcon, 2007
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060594817
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1977
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Reared—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University; M.A. Iowa Writers'
Workshop.
• Awards—Fulbright Scholarship; Guggenheim Fellowship;
Lannan Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California, USA
Daniel Alarcon’s work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. His non-fiction has appeared in Salon.com and Eyeshot, and he is Associate Editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra. He edited a portfolio for the magazine A Public Space on the writing of Peru. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Peru.
Alarcon, a native of Peru, was raised, from the age of 3, in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. and is an alumnus of Indian Springs School in Shelby County, Alabama. He holds a bachelors degree in anthropology from Columbia University and a masters from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has studied in Ghana and taught in New York City.
His first book War by Candlelight was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, nominated "One of 21 Young American Novelists" under 35 by Granta magazine.
His debut novel, Lost City Radio, was published in 2007. Both his books have been translated into Spanish. Lost City Radio will be also published in French and Italian in 2008.
Daniel Alarcon lives in Oakland, California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College.(From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
This book ... lacks the dramatic punch of [his previous] stories.... He never establishes a solid relationship between the story and [the omniscient] narrator, who becomes increasingly intrusive. The first third of the book is evenhanded, allowing various characters to come forward. But the final parts capriciously switch point of view within chapters, sections, even paragraphs....This tactic diffuses the impact of the war...on which the plot hinges.... The final half of the book is marred by dull descriptions ... that lapse into sentimentality (“Norma smiled at him, and she looked like sunshine”), as well as stylistic tics in which fragments echo sentences. Still, there’s enough here to confirm that Alarcón is talented—and wise—beyond his years, that he remains intent on challenging himself and his readers.
Sarah Fay - New York Times Book 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...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 war within a specific place.... Alarcon ... express[es], 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 Alarcón 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 - Washington Post
Set in a fictional South American nation where guerrillas have long clashed with the government, Alarcon'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 Alarcon's successful and nimbly handled portrayal of war's lingering consequences.
Publishers Weekly
Often compared to the work of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Alarcón's harrowing tale of the breakdown of a society and the emotional price paid by its survivors will undoubtedly haunt you long after you've turned the last page.
Bookmarks Magazine
(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, Alarcon reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)