The Elegant Variation

NOTA BENE: TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY

"Now, she realized, the crisis of the day had come.  Was he going to kiss her, or something?  And could she repel him, after all he had done for her?  How many couples had she seen in this posture, in dim lamp-lit patches, murmuring their fervent mysteries against railings, and how little she had dreamed that she would ever be enrolled in that strange corps!  But here she was, as though she had been doing it all her life."

- Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

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.

GORRA ON CONRAD

Set aside some time today (we have) and read Michael Gorra's introduction to Penguin's The Portable Conrad, which has just been posted at the Hudson Review.  We're admirers of Gorra's criticism and particularly enjoyed his introduction to the recent Penguin Classics reissue of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair.

MONDAY MARGINALIA

* Hermione Lee's new biography of Edith Wharton - which landed on our doorstep last week with a resplendent thud - is reviewed in the Independent which finds it (despite its girth) a "glorious biography."

* We recently chided The Big Reviews for failing to note the reissue of two early David Markson works.  The Los Angeles Times takes a step in the right direction, matching the material to the perfect reviewer - Sarah Weinman. 

The first two of these novels are now back in print in a single volume recently reissued by Markson's current publisher, Shoemaker & Hoard, inviting the question of whether his ventures into genre territory are a legitimate precursor to his later, more serious efforts. The answer, as it turns out, isn't just a simple yes but rather an example of how a prodigious talent makes restrictions work for him and not vice versa.

* Noted Hindi author Kamleshwar has died.

* We do find it so entertaining when the New York Post strives for literary cred. (We side with - surprise - James Wood on Kundera: "Like Rabelais, he is robust rather than funny, and suggestive rather than moving."  He is also, increasingly, flat-out incomprehensible.)

* Sausage-making: An insider offers the skinny on the NBCC Finalists.

* We seldom agree with Bob Hoover, but it's hard to argue with his take on Lee Siegel's exhausting Mailer exegesis.  We do, however, point Hoover's attention to the New York Review of Books which has been beautifully filling the function he describes as missing from American letters.

* Move over, Oprah.  Tom Stoppard displays a magical book-moving touch with his mention of Isaiah Berlin's classic Russian Thinkers, which informs his Coast of Utopia trilogy.

In recent years sales of the book have been, shall we say, steady. Its publisher Penguin says it averaged 36 sales a month across the whole of the United States.

But since November booksellers in New York have noticed a strange phenomenon: customers have been requesting the title in growing numbers and there are now 2,000 orders for it that cannot be supplied.

* Jai Arjun Singh offers up detailed reportage from the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival.

* This one sounds interesting, indeed - The Washington Post reviews Dirt for Art's Sake, a look at the history of "obscene" books on trial which go on to become classics.

* Fred Ramey, the always thoughtful publisher of Unbridled Books, offers his latest thoughts what he's supposed to be doing.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every time a new bit of technology arrives, publishers start waving their arms in the ether and hollering up and down the halls of Manhattan realizing again how little they know about what comes next: How do we publish “books” in the world of the new media? How will readers want their “books”? What are we publishers supposed to be doing?

* And, finally, Powells' latest author interview is with Paul Auster.

NOTA BENE: FROM THE FIFTEENTH DISTRICT

"Although an epidemic of haunting, widely reported, spread through the Fifteenth District of our city last summer, only three acceptable complaints were lodged with the police."

- Mavis Gallant, From the Fifteenth District

TEV GIVEAWAY: RUSSIAN TWOFER

Martin Amis isn't the only novelist mining Russian territory.  Last year saw two exceptional novels touch on different aspects of the Russian experience.

James Meek's The People's Act of Love - winner of the 2006 Ondaatje Prize - takes Sibera at the end of the Russian Revolution as its setting.  Here's what the Guardian had to say:

The silly but persistent notion that the novel is dead, or that modern fiction cannot tell us anything startling and thought-provoking about our humanity or the world we live in, is repeatedly debunked by this book. The People's Act of Love has a timeless quality; it will be read, referenced, studied and talked about for years to come.

Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov looks at what happens when an underground artist reinvents himself as a Soviet apparatchik.  Jonathan Yardley found Grushin to be "the real thing" and called her first novel:

... so wise and mature that it is tempting to suspect the author's biography is a joke. The Dream Life of Sukhanov is sophisticated, ironic and witty, multilayered, intricately constructed, deeply informed, elegantly written -- the work, one would think, of someone who has been writing and publishing fiction for years, not someone who is doing it for the first time, and doing it in what is not her native language.

We're pleased to offer this pair of books to the first reader who emails us with the subject line "THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING".  As always, please remember to include your full mailing address and, as always, prior winners are ineligible.  Thanks to Penguin and Canongate for the prize copies.

UPDATE: Congratulations to winner Tom Grace of New York.

LITERARY PAPRIKA

Tom Teicholz - of Tommywood fame - profiles this humble enterprise and its host for the current issue of the Jewish Journal.

Sarvas feels that "he's at the right place and at the right time," he said. He believes "there's an evolving sense of a literary community," both in Los Angeles and in cyberspace. In that regard, he was also instrumental in founding the Litblog Coop, a blog that recommends contemporary fiction.

Part of what Sarvas most enjoys about his blog is the friends he has made and the correspondences he has had with readers from all over the world. He has even engendered a literary dust-up with another blogger -- not quite Mailer vs. Vidal or a Trump vs. Rosie fracas but still evidence of the growing pains of an ever-expanding community.

How MOTEV will kvell ...

BEATS GETTING A FAKE PHONE NUMBER*

We're a bit distracted today, so we leave you to spend what are likely to be hours of fun over at Esquire's Napkin Project, where you'll find dozens of notable authors who responded to Esquire's challenge:

It's an old story, we figured. Someone, in a bar somewhere, scribbling on a napkin in the failing afternoon light; the kind of story or list or note that might be crammed in a pocket and pulled out years later to tell something deep and forgotten — perhaps life’s most intimate first chapter, nearly lost forever. So we gave this spontaneous medium a shot. We put 250 napkins in the mail to writers from all over the country — some with a half dozen books to their name, others just finishing their first. In return, we got nearly a hundred stories. We present a sampling here — from lush to spare, hilarious to terrifying.

Respondents include the likes of Andrew Sean Greer, Rick Moody, AM Homes, Aimee Bender, Kent Haruf and none other than Jim Ruland.  Check them out and enjoy.  Be sure to come back tomorrow, when the Friday giveaway features an extremely interesting Russian-themed twofer.

* Not that we ever have, of course.  Ahem.

RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI DIES

The morning email brings us the sad news that Ryszard Kapuscinski has died.

The book that introduced Mr. Kapuscinski to readers and critics beyond Poland was a slim one, ostensibly about Ethiopia, which he wrote in 1978 and which appeared in English five years later under the title “The Emperor.”

Subtitled “Downfall of an Autocrat” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), the book on one level portrayed the lapsed life of Haile Selassie’s imperial court by citing the recollections of palace servants, like the man responsible for cleaning the shoes of visiting dignitaries.

Granta has posted the full text of Bill Buford's 1987 interview with him, along with the piece of memoir they ran two years ago, "When There is Talk of 1945".

We find ourselves in an increasingly bleak landscape. There is smoke along the distant horizon, we pass empty settlements, lonely, burned-out houses. We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned implements of war, bombed out railway stations, overturned cars. It smells of gunpowder, of burnt things, of rotting meat. We encounter dead horses everywhere. The horse—a large, defenceless animal—doesn't know how to hide; during a bombardment it stands motionless, awaiting death. There are dead horses in the roads, in ditches, in the fields a bit further out. They lie there with their legs up in the air, as if shaking their hooves at the world. I don't see dead people anywhere; they are quickly buried. Only the horses—black, bay, piebald, chestnut—lie where they stood, as if this were not a human war but a war of horses; as if it were they who had waged among themselves a battle to the death and were its only victims.

TEV GUEST REVIEW: INLANDIA

Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California’s Inland Empire
Edited by Gayle Wattawa
Heyday Books / Santa Clara University
433 pp., paperback $18.95

GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL A. OLIVAS

Long the Rodney Dangerfield of Southern California, the Inland Empire sits about an hour east of Los Angeles and encompasses the fast-growing counties of Riverside and San Bernardino.

Far from the beaches of Malibu, it is a tough land, some say, the home of biker gangs and urban sprawl, a land buffeted by the unrelenting Santa Ana (or "Devil") winds that can flip cars and jangle nerves. Tell an Angeleno that you make your home in the Inland Empire and be prepared for the condescending half-smile followed by a wisecrack: "Oh, the methamphetamine capital of the world."

But this era of insult might have come to an end, if Heyday Books and Santa Clara University have any say in it. Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California's Inland Empire, meticulously edited by Gayle Wattawa ($18.95 paperback), is an ambitious collection that finally gives the area its due as a culturally and historically vital component of Southern California.

In the anthology's introduction, Riverside native and National Book Award finalist Susan Straight tells us that she has striven to infuse her writing with "the fierceness we retain in these small places where people loved their own with the vehemence, the stubborn and suspicious and inventive qualities required to survive this part of Southern California."

Straight is not alone in attempting to depict all the complexities and beauty of the Inland Empire and its people. More than 70 authors are represented in fiction, poetry, native legends, journal entries and other writings from the 1700s to the present.

Some of the writers enjoy worldwide fame and have been translated into many languages. We're treated to an excerpt from a 1930 tough-guy novelette, "Blood-Red Gold," by Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. And there's the exquisitely creepy essay, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" by Joan Didion, concerning a woman accused of murder in the 1960s. Other "big names" abound, including Norman Mailer, John Steinbeck, Joan Baez and Raymond Chandler.

Wattawa includes newer voices, writers who have lived or are living in the region and who feel compelled to chronicle the history and culture of their home through fiction. Kathleen Alcalá, who grew up in San Bernardino, offers the short story "Gypsy Lover," a haunting tale of one girl's attempt to come to terms with her older sister's mysterious disappearance. And in "Georgie and Wanda," Michael Jaime-Becerra skillfully fictionalizes the racial bigotry faced by a young couple in Riverside circa 1956.

Many of the nonfiction pieces are simply heartbreaking. Diary excerpts from George Fujimoto Jr. starkly recount the federal government's rounding up of his family members, who were housed in Arizona internment camps for the duration of World War II. Similarly, Malcolm Margolin's "The Cupueño Expulsion of 1903" details the removal of a native people for their valuable land.

Smaller-scale tragedies are perfectly rendered here, too, as in Alex Espinoza's powerful short story, "Santo Niño," that brings us into the lives of two young women as they battle economic hardship, infertility and strained relationships. And in "hap & hazard highland" by Keenan Norris, a young ex-con tries to reconnect with his old neighborhood as well as with his youthful dreams.

At the turn of each page, there are surprising little shocks as we enter themes radically different from the one before. For example, after the essay "909," Percival Everett's wry and provocative contemplation of Riverside County, out of the blue follows Sholeh Wolpé's poem, "Morning After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq," in which the community of Redlands seems unfazed by the beginning of the war: "The chatter is as always, quiet, / The smiles as always, broad."

No review can fully capture the breadth and spirit of this remarkable anthology. Suffice it to say that each author surprises, informs and entertains. Inlandia paints a complex and compelling portrait of a region that is simultaneously beautiful and harsh, multicultural and alienating, vibrant and destructive. Without question, it is a portrait that commands our respect.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and shares blogging duties on La Bloga . Visit his Web page at http://www.danielolivas.com. This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.