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A Novel
by Daniel Alarcon
Book Reviewed by:The breakout book from a prizewinning young writer: a breathtaking, suspenseful story of one man's obsessive search to find the truth of another man's downfall.
Nelson's life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country and moved to the United States, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can't seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson's hero, Henry Nunez, leader of the storied guerrilla theater troupe Diciembre. And that's when the real trouble begins.
The tour takes Nelson out of the shelter of the city and across a landscape he's never seen, which still bears the scars of the civil war. With each performance, Nelson grows closer to his fellow actors, becoming hopelessly entangled in their complicated lives, until, during one memorable performance, a long-buried betrayal surfaces to force the troupe into chaos.
Nelson's fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson's story?and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices.
Set in an unnamed South American country, At Night We Walk in Circles explores concepts of identity and loss, among others, in a soulful story that confirms Alarcon’s status as one of America’s most dazzling fiction writers...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
The theater group Diciembre, in At Night We Walk in Circles, sounds a lot like Peru's award-winning independent theater collective, Yuyachkani. Launched in 1971, the group's essential pillars have been political performances, theatrical experimentation and performances steeped in indigenous culture.
Yuyachkani is a Quechua word that means "I am thinking/I am remembering." The company is at the forefront of Latin American theater, and makes education and community issues the cornerstones of its work. One of Yuyachkani's principles is the belief that "an evaluation of the past makes us understand the present." To that end, Yuyachkani has focused its action around one main objective: to contribute to the development and strengthening of ...
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Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and The Vagrants
Nabokov says that imagination is a form of memory, and this novel is a perfect example of this claim. In writing about a place, its people and its history, Daniel Alarcón's memory catches the evanescent details of everyday life, while his imagination, never for a moment blurred, creates a powerful story with so many intricate characters. This is a novel written with extraordinary vision and wisdom.
