War by Candlelight

War by Candlelight, by Daniel Alarcón (2005)

“In Lima,” writes Daniel Alarcón, “dying is the local sport.” The same is true of the Peruvian countryside, where one of the author’s characters loses his wife in a fantastic mudslide that inundates his entire village.

Alarcón’s Peru is a hard place to make a life. Nearly all of the short stories in this collection catalog the war torn country’s violence, its corruption and its lack of opportunity for able-bodied citizens. At the same time, there is a gentle nature about many of the author’s protagonists, most of who are simply trying to make the best of a bad situation.

The majority of these stories take place in Lima, a city that contains a large penitentiary for terrorists and street thugs. The local kids refer to the facility as the University “because it’s where you went when you finished high school.” In Alarcón’s first story, Flood, every moment – every breath it seems – is dominated by the neighborhood turf war, the threat of incarceration and worst of all, death at the hand of a rival gang.

For the author’s story, Absence, the scene shifts to post 9/11 New York City, where Wari, a painter, is having a showing of his work. Before leaving Peru, the painter is warned by a friend to shave, lest security officials mistake him for an Arab. The reader follows his experience at the American Embassy in Lima and even here, his situation is made more difficult. Hoping to obtain a ninety-day stay, Wari finds he can only get a one-month tourist visa. After a meeting with an abrasive embassy agent, he is limited to two weeks out-of-country.

Daniel Alarcón writes with such an authentic voice that it’s hard to imagine the lives of the people of Peru being any different that what he describes. All of the stories here bring a new tragedy – the loss of a loved one, or the story of a laid off bank employee, Miguel, who has been pleading with his girlfriend, the mother of their child, for her hand in marriage for five years. The woman loves Miguel but tells him but that she is not sure that that is enough. Miguel muses that “in this city, there is nothing more useless than imagining a life... There is no work,” he complains.

Born in Lima and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Alarcón has written a beautiful, if sobering, collection of short stories. Strongly recommended for adult readers.