EXCLUSIVE - TEV GUEST INTERVIEW: DANIEL ALARCÓN

We are very pleased to host Daniel Olivas' wonderful interview with author Daniel Alarcón, about whom more presently:

INTERVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS

Daniel Alarcón’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, Eyeshot and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. A former Fulbright Scholar to Peru and the recipient of a Whiting Award for 2004, he lives in Oakland, California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College. His story collection, War by Candlelight (HarperCollins), was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award.

This February will bring the publication of Alarcón’s first novel, Lost City Radio (HarperCollins). Set in an unnamed South American country that has suffered through years of war and government abuses, Alarcón’s novel centers on Norma, the host of a popular program on which she reads the names of missing persons and, in the process, gives hope to callers who desperately want to reunite with lost loved ones. Norma has become a celebrity primarily with those outside the city who live in the mountain and jungle villages. Norma herself nurses the hope of finding her husband, Rey, who disappeared ten years earlier perhaps because of his antigovernment activities. One day, a village boy is brought to the radio station to meet Norma. The boy carries a letter that includes a list of lost people that the boy’s village would like Norma to read on her program. But he may also prove to be a link to Norma’s missing husband.

Lost City Radio is already garnering advance praise including this from Booklist: “A debut novel that is a marvel of concision and soulfulness... Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness of both the jungle and the city, Alarcón reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace.” David Ulin, book editor for the Los Angeles Times, calls Alarcón a “face to watch in 2007.”

Alarcón kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his novel, the writing process and other literary matters.

DANIEL OLIVAS: Why did you decide to set your novel in an unnamed South American country? Why not place it specifically in Peru?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: In writing this novel, I didn’t want to feel restricted in any way by the history, geography, or social landscape of Peru. It wasn’t my intention to be coy: I’m Peruvian, the general arc of the war as it unfolds in the novel is similar to that of the Peruvian conflict, and everyone will be able to recognize this. Still, the more I’ve traveled, the more places I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to, the more it has become clear to me that the forces shaping the future of a city like Lima are at work in developing countries all over the planet. When I was on tour last, for War by Candlelight, I always found myself saying, “If Peru was an invented country, and Lima an invented city, many people would still recognize it,” and I guess I sort of followed my own advice. I invented a country, a city, drew upon my experiences in Lima, upon my travels in West Africa, upon texts I read about Chechnya (the incomparable Anna Politkovskaya, RIP), or Beirut, or Mumbai. I was influenced and deeply inspired by the work of Joe Sacco as well, whose books on Palestine and Bosnia are truly masterful. The liberty to call on all kinds of sources was freeing: I came across a book called Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist, possibly apocryphal, but it rang so true when compared with the interviews I had done in Peru and Bolivia, that I felt confident referencing it in my attempt to create a composite of what that life might have been like. I am a great admirer of Ryszard Kapuscinski as well, and his death today has made me very, very sad. It is a tremendous loss for literature, and personally, I wish most of all that I’d had a chance to tell him face to face how much his work has meant to me over the years. This novel probably owes as much to his influence as to any historical or sociological text of about the Peruvian conflict. Of course, I read many of those as well: Carlos Tapia, Gustavo Gorritti, and Carlos Iván Degregori, just to name a few, have been faithful reporters and brilliant analysts of the conditions that gave rise to the war in Peru.

OLIVAS: You note at the end of the novel that you began researching in 1999 and, in the process, interviewed many people about their experiences during Peru’s war years. Are there certain interviews that stand out as particularly moving or inspiring?

ALARCÓN: I was living in San Juan de Lurigancho, a district of Lima very similar to the place called Tamoé in the novel. I lived near the market, in a small rented room above a bodega, and taught photography in the neighborhood four days a week. Most of my students lived within a few blocks of me. There was a family down the street whose daughter was in my class, and they sort of adopted me, looked after me, and I would often go over there, to get a meal, or to talk politics with my student’s father. They were exceedingly kind to me, and they were folks who had been there from the beginning, since the night the neighborhood was founded, when it was just chalk lines on the barren earth, since the land takeover in 1984. They had come from Ayacucho, the province that gave birth to the Shining Path, and also the region of the country most affected by the relentless violence of the 1980s. I remember one night, it came out in conversation that I had studied Anthropology in college, which meant, in actuality that I had taken a set of classes concerned at least superficially with the diversity of human responses to the mystery of being alive on the planet now. I found it difficult to explain that the fact that I had studied it did not mean I was an anthropologist, that the American system of education works differently, that my four year degree qualified me for exactly nothing. The information hung there. “So you can help us,” the father said, and I didn’t know how to respond, and then quite suddenly, he was gone, away in another room, rummaging through papers. A few minutes later, he came back with lists of the people missing from his village, depositions he had taken of witnesses. He said, “What we’ve needed all these years is an anthropologist, someone to help us. We know where it is. We know what the army did to them…” I tried to explain, but he wouldn’t hear it, and I listened as he described a rather routine army action in the sierra during the 1980s, something that could be accurately labeled a massacre, and he asked me to help him take his village’s case to the Truth Commission. This was 2002. The people whose names were typed on the papers he showed me had been dead for fifteen years. “We need an anthropologist,” he said over and over. Cultural anthropology, forensic anthropology—it was all the same to him. He wanted me to help him dig up a mass grave.

OLIVAS: Was the transition from writing short stories to a full-length novel difficult? Which do you prefer?

ALARCÓN: Everything about writing is difficult, but I do prefer the novel. There is more pleasure in it, more seduction, I think, if only because you spend more time with your characters, and get to know them so well. Stories, by their very form, impose a certain discipline on the narrative impulse that is sometimes hard to accept. In any case, each story demands its own form, and one shouldn’t really resist that. I began Lost City Radio thinking it was story. Then I called it a long story, then a novella, then a short novel, and didn’t use the word novel until it was almost done.

OLIVAS: What are you working on now? Another novel? Short stories?

ALARCÓN: A little bit of everything. I spent the fall trying to push various projects past page forty, without much success. I’m onto something now, but I’d rather not talk about it just yet. In the long term, I’d like to write more novels, and also do much more journalism. It’s a dream of mine to do a sort of This American Life produced in Lima. Esta Vida Peruana or something like that. I’m beginning the process of trying make this happen. I would start in Lima, I think with people’s stories, first person accounts from the wide range of experiences that exist in the city. Nothing like that has ever been done in Peru that I’m aware of. What interests me most of all are narratives: whether they exist in the world as novels, story collections, radio documentaries, posters or websites is really beside the point. The issue is how to tell the stories that move people, the stories that get at how people live today, and have those stories make an impact. Lima is awash in stories, but for reasons of race, class, geography, etc., we learn very little about each other that isn’t alarmist, divisive, or designed to breed suspicion. I’ve envisioned a radio program, or a series of radio programs that could begin to counteract that.

OLIVAS: Has becoming a published author altered your view of literature?

ALARCÓN: No, I wouldn’t say that. Being published has made me acutely aware of my preposterous good luck. I have also learned, by necessity, something about the business of publishing, the commodification of literature, as unrelated to art as a swimming pool is to the ocean. I’m not mad at it—it’s simply something I’ve learned to deal with. Swimming pools are not in and of themselves terrible. But of course, literature is still it: the conversations writers have with the authors who first inspired them—this is the only good reason to do this work. When we write stories we’re part of a tradition that stretches back to the beginning of history. The only way I know to approach the blank page is with humility before the scale of what has been already achieved, along with a sense of hope, and above all, playfulness.

OLIVAS: Any observations about teaching creative writing?

ALARCÓN: I’ve come to enjoy teaching quite a bit, which isn’t something I could’ve said a year ago. I taught high school in New York, some undergrad at Iowa, and I taught high school age kids again in Lima, but I wasn’t really prepared to deal with graduate students. I had no idea how to do it. As with anything, the more you do it, the easier, the more enjoyable it becomes, but it was pretty touch-and-go there for a minute. When I started, I was trying to finish Lost City Radio, trying to learn on the fly, and was in way over my head. My sincere apologies go out to those who had the misfortune of being in my classes a year and a half ago. I’m much more comfortable in front of students now.

[NOTE: For Daniel Alarcón’s book tour schedule, visit http://www.danielalarcon.com/english/readings/.]

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and is a frequent reviewer for the El Paso Times and Multicultural Review. He shares blogging duties on La Bloga. Visit his Web page at http://www.danielolivas.com.