Daniel Alarcón, whose first novel, Lost City Radio, was widely praised as an eloquent fable-like tale of war's arbitrary consequences, continues the theme in the ambitious At Night We Walk in Circles.
Once again, Peruvian-born Alarcón sets his story in a nameless South American country ravaged by war. The novel begins by shifting back and forth between Henry Nunez, a troubled playwright who has spent years in the country's most notorious prison on charges of terrorism for his subversive political play The Idiot President, and Nelson, a young actor fresh out of theater school, still in love with a sometime girlfriend and left to care for his widowed and devastated mother. Henry is staging a revival of his play with a small troupe and performing the title role, with plans for a tour through the provinces. Star-struck and in awe of the famous playwright, Nelson does not hesitate when invited to play the part of the president's son.
Only here, well into the novel, does the real narrator emerge, a nameless investigator who pieces together the story of what happens when, midway through the tour, Henry visits the family of his long-ago prison lover and accidentally reveals a secret detail that sets off a chain of events with a shattering conclusion.
How Alarcón manages this layered and complex structure is one of the novel's many pleasures. The country is nameless, but the descriptions are specific and vivid. The village where the trouble begins is "a village without men." Young men leave, their faces full of hunger. It is a picturesque and idyllic place, but Alarcón's lush descriptions are ultimately depictions of absence, underlining the obliterations caused by war. The narrator, all but absent at the beginning of the story, increasingly inserts himself, spinning out subplots, cutting back and forth in time, making us question his motives and his connection to the characters even as he begs the question of whose story is being told. It is everyone's story, the novel seems to be telling us, as each character is by turn a perpetrator and a victim of thoughtless cruelties, with luck and fate hinging on the most random of actions. In this way, too, we slowly fill in the blanks about the love story at the novel's heart.
At Night We Walk in Circles is a breathtaking novel, intimate and sweeping, about the capriciousness of fate and how its ultimate brutality can come in the form of absence and longing. --Jeanette Zwart
Shelf Discovery: An important new novel about the enduring consequences of war and love, based on Alarcón's New Yorker short story.