Auction. Is. Over.
Which means… I can blog again! Thank god. Sorry for the lapse in posts… it was unavoidable. But I am back and hopefully better than ever.
Today’s pick is Lost City Radio, a book by Daniel Alarcon that I’ve read a few reviews of this year. It is set in a nameless Latin American country in the aftermath of a civil war. The main character, Norma, hosts a weekly radio show in which she reads the names of people who have disappeared during the war, in the hopes that they can be reconnected with their families. She herself has lost her husband, and her program is as much therapeutic for her as it is an attempt to find him. Through her program, Norma meets a young orphaned boy from a distant village who hopes that she will be able to help him find some of his family, including a father whose identity he does not know. From him, Norma uncovers some clues as to her own husband’s fate, and she travels with him to his village to try to learn more.
The book is as much about Norma and the boy’s personal losses as it is about the effects of war and the politics of Latin America, "the existential suffering of Third World political misery, and the ordinary dangers of middle-class life under a system in which values float without notice from democracy to autocracy and back again," according to The San Francisco Chronicle, which also calls the book "shadowy and brilliant."
From The Washington Post:
These are all interesting and appealing characters who emerge as discrete human beings rather than mere cardboard representations of certain inescapable Latin American social and political realities. Still, the dominant character in the novel is not its protagonist, Norma, but the war itself. Its malign effects are felt everywhere, from the anonymous hamlets of the jungle and mountains to the wealthy neighborhoods of the capital and its sprawling barrios, acre upon acre of shacks steadily climbing up the bleak hills surrounding the city as more and more people flee there from the beautiful but violent countryside.
Here are some excerpts from online/blog reviews of the book:
From Book Closet: "Not very often do you come across a story as elegant and impressive as Lost City Radio and this book was a delightful read. Don’t miss it!"
From the KQED website (public radio station in San Francisco): "I got a few odd sidelong glances from my fellow coffee shop patrons the other morning. But I couldn’t blame them. I was, after all, hunched over a book and alternately biting my lip, putting a hand over my mouth, and even, in the final few pages, wiping stray tears from the corners of my eyes. I am not usually such an emotionally demonstrative reader, but then again, not every novel is Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio, a book so insanely good that I’ve been forcing it on everyone I know."
From Illiterati: "Go out and get it, and then come back here and tell me how much you loved it, because you will."
Have any EDIWTB readers read Lost City Radio yet?