Daniel Alarcón’s drifters seek refuge, but rarely find it
In the last of 10 stories included in Daniel Alarcón’s dark and incisive “The King Is Always Above the People,” one of the collection’s many drifting men recalls a city park to which he used to take his stepson. He knows he’ll never visit it again — just as he knows his stepson will never see it again with the “magical imagination” he’d possessed as a child.
These stories — many set in an unnamed Latin American country resembling Alarcón’s native Peru, with a few unfolding in the United States where he’s lived most of his life — are filled with young men who’ve lost their innocence and their way. Many of them would be right at home in the 1930s world of John Steinbeck.
Much like Nelson — the antihero whose decline and fall are chronicled in Alarcón’s spellbinding “At Night We Walk in Circles” — these lost souls often grow callous and cruel, in a country that one story’s narrator describes as “stinking, violent, diseased.”
They witness random and pointless fights, involving men who can’t find work and have nothing to do, in cities and towns that are falling apart and that time itself seems to have forgotten. Many of these locales have the sort of surrealistic, menacing air of a hellish provincial town in a Robert Bolaño novel.
Related:Novel tells tale of Latin American disconnect
Four stories involve narrators who own or inherit property that poses a burden rather than offering an opportunity; these dwellings are metaphors for a crumbling country from which everyone hopes to leave. “Migration” is “woven into the story of this nation,” one old man says. Another earns a living translating documents “so yet another one of ours can flee.”
But those who leave miss what they’ve left behind, longing to return home even though they know deep down they can’t ever go home again.
In “The Provincials” — longest and best story here — a Nelson bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Nelson of “Circles” recalls journeying with his father to the ancestral family home they’ve inherited. Nelson and his father stick out as city snobs among people who admire and hate them. “I knew I would never come back,” the narrator tells us. “That realization made me a little sad.”
In the next best and second longest story, “The Bridge,” the narrator realizes all that separates him from his poor relations, who live in a part of the city he and his family never visit and imagine as unsafe. We “believed many things about our city without needing them confirmed,” he admits, while ruefully recognizing “that our world had nothing to do with that one.”
Divorced from their surroundings, Alarcón’s men are also cut off from their families and out of touch with themselves.
Fathers in these stories are usually distant or absent. In “The Bridge,” the narrator’s father has gone insane. In another story, the father beats his wife and 10-year-old son.
Most relationships with women belong to the past; they’re fondly remembered despite having failed — usually because Alarcón’s men are such narcissists, convinced that every woman wants to sleep with them. Invoking Circe in an homage to “The Odyssey,” Alarcón closes his collection by suggesting the price such men pay for drifting rather than settling down.
Such settlement dominates “The Thousands,” the collection’s first story; at just three pages, it’s the shortest. Chronicling the over-night erection of a squatter settlement — revisited in a later story as a poor but now-established neighborhood — it’s also the most hopeful.
“These are our homes,” the settlers insist on their first day, while defying the government bulldozers sent to raze what they’ve made. Nothing doing: “We stood arm in arm, encircling what we had built, and did not move.”
In a collection where those on the move continually get lost, “The Thousands” suggests an alternative: Staying put. Clasping arms and joining forces, the lost and forgotten choose instead to come together and make a community — investing in a future rather than running from the past.