Daniel Alarcón’s At Night We Walk in Circles (Riverhead Books) is a mystery, a character study, and a political parable exploring the nature of art, love, language and the distorting effects of war. This richly layered second novel begins in the seaside capital of an unnamed Latin American country where Nelson, a recent graduate of drama school, is invited to join a subversive guerrilla theatre troupe. As Nelson and two compatriots—including Nelson’s hero, playwright Henry Nuñez—make their way through the countryside on a revival tour of Nuñez’s play “The Idiot President,” the lines between character and actor grow ever thinner. As the unreliable narrator of the novel pieces together Nelson’s story, he also paints a portrait of a troubled society in which the horrors of the past have left the hearts of the country’s people scarred like the hillsides that bear evidence of a long civil war. A heady follow-up to his lyrical story collection and first novel, At Night We Walk in Circles has garnered comparisons to Borges, Bolaño, Beckett, and Kafka. Reviewing for the New York Times, Ana Menendez hailed the book, writing: “Alarcón fulfills the promise of his two earlier books […] delivering a vibrant, ambitiously political story that derives its power from the personal.” Alarcón’s previous books are the story collection War By Candlelight and the novel Lost City Radio. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting award, and recognized as one of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40, Alarcón currently lives in San Francisco.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 01:20:45 +0000
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