One man’s freedom fighter,” Nelson Mandela famously argued, “is another’s man’s terrorist.” In his debut novel, “Lost City Radio,” Daniel Alarcon reminds that one man’s freedom fighter is probably another woman’s husband, another boy’s father, certainly another man’s son.
Set in a fictional Latin American republic, “Lost City Radio” depicts the trauma inflicted upon a society when these freedom fighters – be they vigilantes or soldiers on the side of the government – simply disappear.
The book takes its title from a popular radio show in what Alarcon describes as the nation’s “provincial capital.” Each Sunday, the station broadcasts the names of the disappeared. “The idea was simple. How many refugees had come to the city? How many of them had lost touch with their families? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?”
The voice connecting the lost with the found belongs to Norma, a brave, beautiful and damaged journalist whom Alarcon brings vividly to life. Her husband, Rey, has been missing for more than a decade.
Alarcon’s portrait of the emotional toll this loss takes on Norma is heart-rending. A decade later, she still sleeps alone, facing the door to her bedroom, as if Rey might still come home in the night.
“Lost City Radio” then cycles backward to tell the story of the country’s war, the way it fractured the committed from the fearful, the urban from the rural, and the collaborative from the resistant.
Based on Alarcon’s descriptions, the country might be Argentina or Chile or the author’s native Peru – all countries wracked by civil wars and state-sponsored disappearances. But the observations this book makes aren’t limited to Latin America, especially when it comes to the siren call of violence.
“Before the war began, those of Norma’s generation still spoke of violence with awe and reverence,” Alarcon writes: “cleansing violence, purifying violence, violence that would spawn virtue.”
It doesn’t take long for the society to realize that the fire next time can become the fire all the time – fires that burn indiscriminately, torching neighborhoods and families, the innocent and the guilty together. Indeed, these blazes become one of the most compelling metaphors of “Lost City Radio.”
The novel’s key plot revolves around a boy who is sent from a village to the city to have a list of names read on Norma’s show. His appearance sets off a chain of events that show how all of the characters are more connected than at first appears.
Alarcon is still in his late 20s, but he manages the complicated plot mechanisms this storyline requires like a veteran. Even more impressively, though, time and again he resists the urge to bring the anvil of judgment down upon any one of his characters.
And so we emerge from this impressive political fable with a profound sense of loss, of rage, and a clarifying glimpse into the futility of violence. “What does the end of a war mean,” Alarcon writes, early in the book, “if not that one side ran out of men willing to die?” In some cases, that is not an accident. It is because they have gone missing.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Lost City Radio
By Daniel Alarcon
HarperCollins, 257 pages, $24.95
