Geceleri Daireler Çizerek Yürürüz

by Daniel Alarcón, Nuray Önoğlu (Translator)

Diciembre adlı tiyatro kumpanyasının son iki mensubu, Henry ve Patalarga, eski ve unutulmaz bir deneyimi bir kez daha yaşamayı kafaya koyar ve oyundaki üçüncü karakterin rolünü yeni mezun Nelson’a verip, Peru kırsalında “Ahmak Cumhurbaşkanı” adlı oyunla turneye çıkar. Bu kitapta, birlikte turneye çıkan bu üç aktörün son derece ilginç ve sürprizlerle dolu kişisel hikâyelerine ortak oluyor ve bu hikâyeler aracılığıyla Peru’nun yakın tarihine, ülkeyi perişan eden iç savaşa ve o savaşın etkilerine tanık oluyoruz.

Onun kuşağından insanlar, aslında gayet sıradan olayları açıklamak için korkunç senaryolar yazarken pek az yardıma ihtiyaç duyarlar. Gazete okuyarak, aptalca bir savaşın gönülsüz katılımcıları olarak, anlamsız seçimlerde oy verip durarak, paranın değerini kaybetmesini, istikrar kazanmasını, sonra yeniden değer kaybetmesini izleyerek, yaşıtlarının stres yüzünden kalp krizi geçirmelerine, kansere yakalanmalarına, depresyona düşmelerine tanıklık ederek bir yaşam boyu kusursuzlaştırdıkları bir beceridir bu.…

Mindo’yu güdüleyenin kıskançlık olduğunu varsayabiliriz. Kıskançlığına gafil avlandığını da. Bu duygudan rahatsız olmuştur, beş sabahtır, daha yakın bir geçmişe kadar yalnızca kendisine ait olan dairenin oturma odasındaki kanepede uyanmaktan rahatsız olduğu gibi tıpkı. Derlediğim bilgilerden, Ixta’nın ilişkilerini esasen doğru okuduğu sonucuna varıyorum: O ve Mindo çok iyi ama birbirlerine hiç uygun olmayan iki genç insandı; öyle denk düşmüş, başlangıçta bu gerçeğe gözlerini kapatmışlardı. Zaman içinde, öyle ya da böyle ayrılacaklardı, en iyi koşullar altında bile, birlikte yaptıkları çocuk, Nadia, babasından belli bir uzaklıkta büyüyecekti. Çevrelerindeki pek çok insan sezgileriyle bu durumun farkındaydı ve çok yüksek ihtimalle, işler başka türlü ilerleseydi, Mindo ve Ixta yetişkinlerin genellikle yaptığı gibi bu doğal ve gerekli bir yabancılaşmayla yaşamanın bir yolunu bulacaklardı.

Geceleri Daireler Çizerek Yürürüz’ü bir aşk, ihanet, kıskançlık, intikam ve cinayet hikâyesi olarak da okumak mümkün çünkü bu kitapta hepsi var; ama hepsinin toplamından fazlasını, bir ülkenin kaderini belirleyen olayları büyük bir başarıyla anlatıyor Alarcón.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Latin American, Book Club, Mystery

347 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2013

About the author

Daniel Alarcón’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, Eyeshot and elsewhere. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. His story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and the British journal Granta recently named him one of the Best Young American Novelists. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship (2001), a Whiting Award (2004), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007). He lives in Oakland, California, and his first novel Lost City Radio was published in February 2007.

Reviews

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the last page of Daniel Alarcón’s new novel, someone asks the narrator, “Do you understand?”

The narrator replies, “I do.” Honest readers may have a different response.

But a touch of bewilderment won’t keep you from being entranced by this story, which is so full of bait-and-switch that someone should alert the Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Alarcón is one of those rare writers getting away with doing exactly what he wants. He’s an Iowa Workshop graduate, a Fulbright scholar, a Guggenheim fellow and a Whiting Award winner. The Post named his previous novel, “Lost City Radio,” a “notable” book of 2007. Born in Lima, Peru, in 1977 and raised in Alabama, he has spent his career on various Best Writers Under 40 lists (the New Yorker, Granta, Smithsonian), and yet there’s something aged about his writing. His fiction hovers in that uncanny space mapped out by José Saramago where events seem both concrete and fabled.

Any summary of his new novel, “At Night We Walk in Circles,” is bound to be misleading. On one level it’s about a young actor involved in the revival of an absurdist play called “The Idiot President.” It was first performed, we’re told in the early pages, by a radical group during a civil war in an unnamed South American country. (Readers of “Lost City Radio” will recognize this Peruvian place.) The controversial play, which sounds like bad Ionesco, depicts a tyrannical ruler training a new manservant. At the end of each day, the servant is killed, only to be replaced by a new one. “The idea being,” Alarcón writes, “that eventually every citizen of the country would have the honor of attending to the needs of the leader.” In 1986, the repressive government closed down this “Theater for the People!” after just two performances and arrested the lead actor and playwright for incitement and terrorism.

But that was 15 years ago. Now, Alarcón says with a touch of sarcasm, peace and prosperity have returned. “No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth. . . . The capital was being reimagined — as a version of itself where all that unpleasant recent history had never occurred.” In this hopeful, if amnesiac, time, “The Idiot President” has calcified into an artistic and political legend for hipsters. When a revival tour is proposed in 2001, a 22-year-old actor named Nelson is thrilled to land the part of the president’s son.

Like Rachel Kushner’s recent (and richer) novel, “The Flamethrowers,” this is a story about the initiation of a young artist who descends from the pretentious atmosphere of the conservatory to the capricious world of actual work. Until he got this part, Nelson had been fantasizing about joining his brother in America and writing “a murder mystery set in a futuristic brothel, where male robot-human hybrids paid extra to sleep with that increasingly rare species, the pure human female.” After a few weeks of rehearsal, the three-man cast heads off into the countryside, bringing theater to tiny, depressed towns that have never seen a play before.

It’s soon clear in these pages that we’re not walking in circles just at night. As Alarcón showed in “Lost City Radio,” he’s particularly interested in the ways we re-create events; the membrane between fantasy and what passes for real life here is easily torn. Each day as the members of the cast perform their bombastic political comedy for a handful of baffled peasants, they also engage in their own private dramas: Young Nelson, who’s grown “fond of escapism,” is busy re-imagining his failed romance back home, while the actor playing the president is secretly directing their tour toward an old lover’s house.

Alarcón as self-consciously philosophical as Rivka Galchen (another New Yorker darling), but there’s a similar quality to their writing: a straight-faced presentation of increasingly absurd incidents. It’s not just that “one man in his time plays many parts”; It’s that one man must play conflicting parts simultaneously. For Nelson, that challenge becomes most acute during the tour in a rundown “town where people did not die so much as disappear very slowly, like a photograph fading over time.” There, by a series of missteps, he finds himself drafted to play the part of a real person — but not himself. And that layering of reality and artifice eventually causes this dreamy young man to lose control of his own story in a surprising and poignant way.

Even if there’s nothing traditionally exciting about these obscure actors performing this absurd play in dusty town squares and run-down community centers, the story remains consistently compelling. For one thing, there’s Alarcón’s smoothly polished prose, flecked with wit and surprisingly epigraphic phrases. For another, the wobbly plot resists our efforts to divine what the novel is really about. Characters we initially assumed were important fall away, while people who seemed tangential suddenly become central. As in life, the most casual and inconsequential choices can wrench everything in a different, often tragic direction. While “the ill-fated tour” progresses, a sense of impending threat grows more ominous; placid scenes end suddenly with lines that knock the wind out of you.

But why is this obsessive narrator so determined to track down everyone who interacted with Nelson? For many chapters we’re not aware of him much at all. He interrupts only erratically to mention that he interviewed this or that character. He never gives his name; he won’t even identify his home town except by the abbreviation “T---.”

All this gets meta-weirder if you consider that five years ago, Alarcón published a story in the New Yorker called “The Idiot President” that involved these same characters doing mostly the same things, but it was narrated by Nelson himself. Now, another version of those events is reframed in the voice of this vampiric narrator, “as if,” he says, “by sharing their various recollections, we could together accomplish something on his behalf.”

How you respond to this coy blend of hero worship and evasiveness will determine whether you find Alarcón’s new novel haunting or frustrating. “At Night We Walk in Circles” couldn’t be called a thriller except ironically, but the story’s collision of deception, naivete and violence will definitely push you off balance.

Do you understand?

[Apollinaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, The New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2013 came out today, and I would quibble with some of the choices (Amity Gaige's not-"Lolita," "Schroder," Amy Bender's dated before delivery "Color Master," Dave Eggers' appealing but thin and rather too preachy and obvious dystopian "The Circle"). Plus, as usual the editors chose inclusion over a picture of this particular moment in fiction. But I was happy about all sorts of choices: Jonathan Lethem's "Dissident Gardens"; Meg Wolitzer's domestic epic about midlife crisis among the creative class, "The Interestings"; Javier Marias's sly reflection on love or something, "The Infatuations"; anything ever by Chimamanda Ngochi Adichie (I actually haven't read "Americanah," but am in awe of all her other fiction); Ramona Ausubel's wonderfully weird story collection, "A Guide to Being Born" (and her novel, "No One is Here Except All of Us," is even better); George Saunders' wrenching and painfully 'relatable' "Tenth of December" stories; Jumpa Lahiri's best book yet, "The Lowland"; Alice McDermott's "Someone" (which I raved about already).

And so I will chalk up the omission of Peruvian-American Daniel Alarcon's tremendous "At Night We Walk in Circles" to bad timing: too many big name authors publishing at once and late enough in the year that the NYTBR editors got behind on their reading (tut-tut).

The novel got me so excited I had to stop reading periodically to do the mental equivalent of breathe. It combines the pace of a thriller, the melancholy of a lost love story (and so many kinds of love are lost here), the absurdity of the Latin American political scene and the Ionesco-esque plays that it inspires, and the dizzying effect of a dark hall of mirrors. "At Night We Walk in Circles" sets realism's sense of accident inside absurdist theatre's no-exit maze. It lends the more concrete who-dunnit (or how-done-it) mystery the deliciously life-affirming but indelibly sad unknowability that everyone lives with--how little we know about our own feelings, about how our experience lodges itself in our person. The novel is both specifically funny and engaging and also immensely painful. The circles it walks in are concentric, inside each other, and they ripple out and out.

"But what's the story?" you ask? I'm sure someone on goodreads has described it better than I can do. But in short it's about a young actor, Nelson, who becomes the third wheel in a tour of his writer-hero Henry's play "The Idiot President," for which Henry spent six months in one of the scariest prisons in Peru when it was first produced.

Now the war is over, the country is safer, they think, so they take the old three-person play out of storage and on a small rickety tour into the countryside. Somewhere along the way, Nelson gets embedded in an actual absurd domestic drama. It has huge consequences, for him at least.

"We Walk in Circles" is the portrait of an actor as a young Latin American man at a time when it is not politics that can ruin his life but any brush against the drug cartels and their wide webs of influence, their paranoiac brand of terror.

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that makes me feel ignorant, like everyone else who reads it “gets” it and I just don't. It has received quite a bit of acclaim, and it's not like I don't like that vague genre of “literary fiction.” I don't need an especially strong plot when there is great character development and beautiful writing. I read lots of popular fiction, too, and don't need a lot of wondrous navel-gazing when there is an exciting storyline.

This one – well, I kept expecting to like it, wanting to like it. At the end, I just thought, “ho hum,” and went to bed.

The story is told in first-person, but the reader is not aware of that for quite some time, and isn't aware of who this first person is until almost the end of the book.

Something happens to Nelson, and it's not going to be good. We're told that over and over and over. We get it. Let's move on.

Sure, there is insight into the human soul, but nothing especially interesting, and certainly nothing new. The characters – well, I just didn't feel them, or feel for them. There was no connection, that feeling that you care about people even when you know you are reading fiction.

So perhaps people more sensitive than I will love this book, as quite a few reviewers have, but for me, I was bored.

I was given a copy of this book for review.

[Trish]

When I first read Alarcón’s recent collection of stories, The King is Always Above the People, and realized I had discovered a hugely consequential writer, I tried to find other work by Alarcón. His debut novel, Lost City Radio, is spectacular, about the Peruvian civil war.

This second novel, published some six years later, was more diffuse and talky, harder for me to enter into. It has a wandering beginning, and appears to feint away from that to the larger subject of broken family and societal ties a little further in. An aimless teen on the cusp of manhood falls in with a band of actors and takes a lead role in a play satirizing a corrupt government. This setup has enormous comedic potential, but I was constantly playing catch-up. There did not seem to be any impetus.

It is possible some of the blame reflects on my distracted reading, and the pressure I put on the work by reading all of Alarcón’s work at once. It is conceivable I grew weary reading of a country unfamiliar to me, searching in the work to find touchstones. However, I still must conclude this is not as accessible a work as the other two mentioned above, and recommend those for a beginner.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very skillfully done, but I never got emotionally involved. The plot is well executed, and the difference between modernizing city and brutal dying peasant country in our unnamed South American country is a fascinating glimpse of another (unwritten) novel. But the main character (and the narrator) are too enigmatic. I never cared for either (especially the narrator). Default 3.

[Natalie Serber · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator of Daniel Alarcón's "At Night We Walk in Circles" is an outsider obsessed with uncovering the story of Nelson, a naïve and somewhat snobbish young man whose unhappy fate propels the narrative. Love, identity, the borders between art and reality are all examined in this highly readable novel.

Growing up in an unnamed Latin American country emerging from the shadow of war, Nelson dreams of becoming an actor and playwright like his hero, Henry Nuñez. During wartime, Henry was the founder of Diciembre, a guerrilla theatre troupe that dissolved under charges of terrorism. When an opportunity arises for Nelson to join the revival tour of Henry's politically satirical play, "The Idiot President," Nelson eagerly signs on.

Never mind that the last time the play was performed it landed Henry in the monolithic prison menacingly called Collectors, where he languished for nearly a year. Henry, as he plans the ill-fated revival tour remains incredulous at his imprisonment, "He just couldn't understand why they were so upset - had they seen 'The Idiot President'? It wasn't even any good!"

Nelson, Henry and Patalarga, a bighearted alum of Diciembre, set off on an Andean tour that is as much about bringing theater to the people, about healing the country's past, as it is about personal revival. Henry is escaping the encroaching lonely tenor of his life, Nelson is embracing adventure and change after early disappointments, and Patalarga wants to visit the countryside of his birth. The trio travels through tiny mountain towns, performing in bars, in living rooms, in open fields and abandoned buildings. Nelson approaches his role with intense dedication and sincerity, immersing himself in the world of their play and the countryside, fully leaving behind his life — his girlfriend, Ixta, and his mother — in the city.

Alarcón's descriptions of the tour are vivid and lovely. In Sihaus, a mining town, when their performance in a bar fails to attract an audience, they begin to pack up. The bartender tells them to wait. He sends Nelson outside:

"Night had fallen: the sky was dark. Sihuas was set in a narrow slip of the valley, and Nelson saw nothing in the town's empty streets, but when he got to the corner and looked up, there they were, strings of tiny, bobbing lamplights, hundreds of them, rushing down the trails. They were gold miners, descending the mountains all at once. A half hour later, in a clamor of shouting and noise, they arrived and instantly, [the bar] was overrun."

The three actors find themselves squeezed out when a busload of prostitutes arrives and their makeshift stage disappears beneath the crush of men. This isn't the only time life encroaches upon art. When Henry reroutes their tour to visit the hometown of his cellmate/lover at Collectors, things fall apart for the trio. Suddenly Nelson finds himself playing the role of a dead man to assuage a senile old woman and her violent son. Here the novel asks us, how deep are we willing to go into imagined worlds in order to discover ourselves? Where does art begin and end?

Much of the suspense in the novel comes from the slow revelation of Nelson's downfall, as uncovered by the narrator. He conducts interviews with Henry, Patalarga, Ixta, Nelson's mother, and uses Nelson's journals as a source. Much like Nick Carraway in "The Great Gatsby," the narrator is a seeking bystander who understands there is something universal to be gleaned in Nelson's story. At one point he looks at a photo of Nelson and his brother shown to him by Nelson's mother,

"I had the strangest sensation, like double vision. For just an instant, I thought I saw myself standing just to the side of Francisco and Nelson, with another family — mine — and another set of siblings—my two sisters. An unlikely, but not impossible, coincidence. I stared at the image. I also grew up in this city. I was also once a brown-haired boy with thin legs and a bony chest. I also went to the zoo. We all did. It wasn't me hovering in the background of that old photograph, of course, but that's not the point. It could've been."

Things that could have been haunt Nelson and the narrator and this unnamed country — memories, loves, innocence, all are lost or transformed along his journey. War and its aftermath, drugs, prisons, and violence all play a part in the disillusionment. At one point Henry describes to Nelson what it was like in prison: "Every night in Collectors, friends paired off and walked in circles around the prison yard, commiserating, confessing, doing all they could to imagine they were somewhere else." The novel too, walks in circles, the actors travel away from the city and back again, love is lost than nearly reclaimed only to be lost again, identity is discovered and destroyed.

[Lemar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has many brilliant passages and characters who are so real they linger in my mind. If Shakespeare is right, and he usually is, then "all the world's a stage and the men and women merely players." Daniel Alarcon employs the idea of to beautiful effect in this novel. The prose is sparse yet lush in a way that reminded me of John Steinbeck.
This is the second book I have read primarily by listening to the narration, in this case by Armando Durán. Havng read the first 100 pages, I felt that the narrator really captured the voice I developed in my head. Hearing a book on tape however makes me realize that it is difficult to refer back to favorite passages and makes for a less complete review.

[Spencer Orey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The legacy of South American civil war told through two generations of actors struggling with their ambitions, old expectations,and cycles of violence that change without ending

[Nihan D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Son sayfayı okuduğumda 'keşke devam etseydi' dedim. Büyük bir trajediyi böylesine sade bir dille anlatabilmesi muhteşem

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

accolades can be as much a curse as a blessing for a young writer, given that expectations for literary output of increasing merit run high. peruvian/american author daniel alarcón has received a slew of honors for his fiction, including fulbright and guggenheim scholarships, a lannan fellowship, a pen/hemingway nomination, and a whiting prize, in addition to being named to the prestigious bogotá39, granta "best young american novelist," and the new yorker's "20 under 40" lists - all before reaching his mid-30s. his two previous efforts, war by candlelight (a collection of nine short stories) and lost city radio (a novel set amidst the civil war of a nameless south american country) were both praised widely.

at night we walk in circles, superlatively billed as his "breakout book," mines familiar territory for the san francisco-based author. adapted and expanded from a short story entitled "the idiot president," alarcón's second novel is the tale of a young aspiring actor, nelson, given the chance to tour with a traveling theater group led by his boyhood hero - a playwright named henry nuñez. his theater collective, diciembre, had success with a political play ("the idiot president"), but was forced to disband following henry's imprisonment during the unnamed south american country's civil war. a free man again, henry is convinced to revive the play and begin performing it on the road anew. when nelson is asked to join the cast after his audition (and leave behind ixta, his girlfriend with whom he's still in love), the decision to do so sets in motion a host of events that will irreparably change the life of the young twentysomething, as well as the lives of nearly everyone he encounters.

alarcón's storytelling skills continue to ripen and at night we walk in circles is assuredly his most mature work to date. the plot is a compelling and carefully crafted one conveyed from the perspective of a narrator whom himself figures into the story as it evolves. nelson is an ambitious, if not at times naïve, character seemingly content to seize life's opportunities as they present themselves. alarcón's bildungsroman inevitably leads to tragedy and his slow introduction of tension (clearly foreshadowed throughout) works to great effect. if there's anything to be found lacking in the novel, as can perhaps be noticed in his earlier works as well, it is a notable quality of dispassion in both his characters and the story's unfolding. given the sequence of the book's events, one would expect a heightened or more visceral sense of feeling or emotion commensurate with the action.

nonetheless, with each new book, daniel alarcón seems to grow ever more comfortable with his narrative prowess and literary skill set. at night we walk in circles is indeed a fantastic book, yet one is left with the notion that his strongest and most important outings are still ahead of him. to be so young and writing so well heralds, one hopes, an accomplished literary career that may well lead to a rightfully earned place as a distinguished novelist whose new works come highly anticipated in the many years ahead.

after a dismal year - a breakup, a protracted tenure at an uninteresting job, the disappointing aftermath of a graduation both longed for and feared - nelson was simply delighted by the news. henry was right: nelson, almost twenty-three, had a backpack full of scripts, a notebook jammed with handwritten stories, a head of unruly curls, and seemed much, much younger. perhaps this is why he got the part - his youth. his ignorance. his malleability. his ambition. the tour would begin in a month. and that is when the trouble began.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I read Daniel Alarcon's first novel, I knew I had found a writer I would follow, that I would read every novel he would write. It has been a long wait, five and a half years to be exact, since I read the last page of Lost City Radio.

His new novel is similar in location, an unnamed South American country, but later in time. The civil war that had displaced and separated so many people in the first book has been over for almost a decade and the evidences of war have been built over until the capital city resembles a late 20th century peaceful and upwardly mobile urban area.

Thus the revolutionary tone of upheaval, chaos, and sacrifice that permeates the earlier novel is missing. Alarcon still excels in creating tortured characters longing for people they will not connect with and ideals they will not achieve but he is forced to tell the story from such a different angle. For the first half of At Night We Walk in Circles, I thought I might be reading a different author.

Nelson grew up during the war, called "the anxious years" by his father. A few years after the war ended, Nelson entered the Conservatory, apparently a theater school. The young man became obsessed with Henry Nunez, playwright and leader of the revolutionary guerrilla theater troupe Deciembre. Though he is an inexperienced and mediocre actor, his hero worship lands him a role in the touring revival of Nunez's notorious play The Idiot President. During the war years a performance of this play had resulted in Henry being accused of terrorism and sentenced to spend several years in a dreaded prison known as the Collectors.

Nelson sets off with Henry and another actor, traveling deep into the interior, learning the acting craft from Henry as they put on performances in town squares, school auditoriums, private homes and vacant lots. By this time the novel is almost half over and it is hard to tell what is the point of all of Nelson's insecure, anguished approach to life. In fact, Henry's past had become central to the story: his arrest, his prison years. and his broken spirit since returning to the outside.

Suddenly a convergence of past and present propels Nelson into an impossible situation leaving him trapped in a desolate mountain village. All the earlier pages have been the set up to Nelson's fate. Despite my love for Lost City Radio and my admiration for Alarcon's writing, I had come to that middle point of the novel feeling lost, bored, and let down. Partly due to Nelson's maddeningly indecisive and withdrawn personality and equally due to a slow pace and no apparent plot, I seriously considered reading something else.

I turned the next page and all had changed. Nelson was clearly doomed but where his fate was leading him and how the past and present were tangled and what Alarcon is telling us about identity, character, imagination, and about the intersections between the political and the personal, became the most interesting things in my world.

In addition to the problematic construction of his story, it turns out that the narrator is not the author but a mysterious character whose identity is finally revealed after that sudden change in the middle. I was pleased that Alarcon rescued me and left me somewhat awestruck by the end. Over time, I have a feeling my memory of reading At Night We Walk in Circles will be a fond one. Walking in circles at night in the prison yard with his fellow inmates was Henry's antidote for the horrors of his confinement there. Reading this novel evoked a similar feeling.

[Chris Blocker · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I was reading At Night We Walk In Circles, I caught my ten year old staring at the book cover. “What?” I asked. “That's a weird title,” he said. “Why is it weird?” I asked. He said he didn't know, that it just was. I brushed it off. The next day, while I was reading, my wife interrupted me: “At Night We Walk In Circles—that's an odd title.” “What's so odd about it?” I demanded. She had no answer, but then turned the unanswerable question around on me. “What's the relevance of the title?” she asked. I responded I didn't know yet, but that I was sure I would by the end of the book.

Well, I reached the end; and truthfully, I have no idea what the title means. Likely I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't matter. I wasn't as bugged by the title as they were.

At Night We Walk In Circles is a wonderfully written story that took me down roads I hadn't expected. As the blurb says, this is a novel about Nelson, a young actor, who lands a role in the revival of the controversial play, The Idiot President. The summary promises suspense and antics, but really, what can you expect from a book about a play? But Alarcón has here written a novel that really entertains. The story is fresh. The language is crisp. At no point during the story did I find myself losing interest.

For much of the novel, I thought I was looking at a truly groundbreaking novel, a prize winner that brought to mind other contemporary novels such as Middlesex and The Orphan Master's Son. It comes close, but there are a couple elements that keep me from thinking this book will reach those heights. First, the story is plot and language focused. That's great, and it really moved the book, but I never got a great sense of who these characters were. Second, and perhaps more significant, was the narrative voice. It worked as well, but I couldn't help but wonder if the narrative choice could've been done differently. As our narrator becomes more prominent toward the end of the novel, I found my affection for the novel greatly diminishing. It was an interesting choice, possibly the right one, but it added some disconnect for me as a reader.

Do I recommend you read it? Absolutely, if for no other reason than you can share your ideas about the significance of the title. My family waits with bated breath.

[Güzin Tanyeri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bu kitabın kurmacanın yapısı konulu derslerde okutulması iyi olur, diye düşünüyorum (berjer koltukta :p). Bir hikâye nasıl açılarak sona ulaşır, bir anlatıcı nasıl acele etmeden, okuru da bıktırmaksızın merak unsurunu hep koruyarak usul usul, tatlı tatlı anlatır, olayları sıralar ve karakterleri tanıtır, bu romanı okuyarak öğrendim, diyebilirim. Bazı detaylardaki sevecenliğe kalbimi bıraktım. Çok iyi bir eser. Çok iyi bir çeviri. Çevirmeni değerli Nuray Önoğlu olsa derdi ki, "Ben çevirdim diye demiyorum, okuyun duacım olusunuz" :) Duacınızım. Nelson'ın sözleriyle bitireyim, "Buradaki herkes masumdur, biliyor musun? İstediğine sor, hepsi aynı şeyi söyleyecektir."

[Susana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un recuento de la historia reciente de Perú, lo fácil que es olvidar o glorificar el pasado y como estamos condenados a repetirla, no sé si la primera como tragedia y la segunda como comedia, pero por algo el mundo es redondo.

Como urbanista me llamó la atención el contraste entre Lima y los pueblos perdidos rurales, con descripciones muy gráficas:

"Gran parte de la capital estaba siendo reconstruida. Aunque tal vez sea más correcto decir que la capital estaba siendo reimaginada, como una versión de sí misma en la que toda esa desagradable historia reciente jamás hubiera ocurrido. No había estatuas de homenaje a los muertos, calles con nombres cambiados en su honor o museos de la memoria."

"Había niños; había ancianos; y había un puñado de adolescentes, que eran, en muchos sentidos, como una especie aparte: inquietos, desagradables, con expresiones que Henry reconoció de su pasado. «Eran como reclusos maquinando planes de fuga» ..."

Y del negativismo peruano ¿o del autor?:

"Los miembros de su generación requerían de muy poco para imaginarse escenarios terribles que explicaran situaciones por lo demás comunes y corrientes. Era una habilidad que habían perfeccionado a lo largo de toda una vida: leyendo los diarios; sirviendo como involuntarios participantes-observadores de una guerra estúpida; votando en elecciones sin sentido, una tras otra; mirando cómo la moneda colapsaba, se estabilizaba y colapsaba de nuevo; viendo cómo sus contemporáneos sucumbían a ataques al corazón, cáncer y depresión inducidos por el estrés. Era un milagro que aún tuvieran dientes. O cabello. O piernas para sostenerse."

Todos los personajes me resultaron poco atractivos, con la presencia muy desdibujada de personajes femeninos.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

a brilliant story set in alarcon's novelistic country (here too in his first novel Lost City Radio ) and the bad old days of weird elected dictators is over and growth baby is the new goal, for rich developers, for rich black economy, for the disappeared middle class too. that is where most of the characters come from, a middle class born and bred to take it. take crazy elected dictators, take their economy, their country, their hope shredded and stolen right before their eyes. and they can just watch and read about it in the papers. but now is now, growth, hope. so this is a story of taking that hope on the road for a little nostalgic, grateful dead reunion type tour of an avant garde play brutally repressed 20 years ago. it doesnt go much better this time, in the end, but reader does get to see rural peru and how it has emptied out, all the young gone to the city or in the black economy. also we get to see peruvian prison, where the baddest man runs his own wing. also we get to see the peruvian city, where so much changes fast. not much hope here really, a sad, enlightening novel.
note too another nice novel dealing with rural peru is Red April

[Jayme · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been reading At Night We Walk in Circles off and on for the last month. The novel tells the story of two men, Henry a playwright who will be imprisoned for a play that he wrote and Nelson an actor who will be part of the revival of that same play 20 years later. Throughout the book you know that something horrible is going to happen to Nelson, but when it finally arrives on the last 6 pages it is rather anticlimactic and left me feeling huh?

I did enjoy the sense of time and place that Alacron has written almost effortlessly and beautifully. I felt he really knew the location (even if, as readers, we are never given that information) which made the book come alive with the people and turmoil of South America.

The story is told in the first person and I kept waiting for the big revelation of who the person is telling the story. I think Alarcon is too because just when I think the story will really unfold it hesitates almost as if Alarcon has changed his mind on what direction he wants to go and how the story will end.

On the last page someone asks the narrator, “Do you understand?”

The narrator replies, “I do.” But I didn’t.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

And by day we talk in circles
Slow getting nowhere.

The narrative was drowning in words, coming up for air only to gulp more words. There was more than a little self indulgence ... oooh look ... my navel! ... a shame, as there were some vibrant pieces of writing. It just laboured too much as a novel.

The main character, who joins a travelling theatre company taking a politically charged play on tour, lets life lead him by the nose. Like a tsunami, it all washed over him and sweeps him away in its dirty maelstrom. For me the trouble was that, by the end, I sighed for him in his disastrous predicament, but that was about as much empathy as I could muster. He was too much "merely a player" in his own destiny.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts ...

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Idiot President’s son…

Nelson has spent his young life expecting to leave his South American home and emigrate to the US in the footsteps of his elder brother, on a chain migration visa. But, just as it finally seems this dream is about to become reality, Nelson’s father dies and he knows he can’t simply leave his mother alone. He has always wanted to be an actor/playwright, and is coming to the end of his studies at the Conservatory. He auditions for a role in a touring revival of a play, The Idiot President, which once gained notoriety for Diciembre, the company who originally performed it in towns and villages during the recent civil war. Henry Nuñez, who wrote the play, and Patalarga were original members of the three-man cast, and will again play the eponymous Idiot President and his servant, while Nelson is chosen to play Alejo, the President’s son. As they tour the provinces of the country, the three men will gradually learn about each other’s pasts and develop an intricate and intimate kind of friendship. But we know from our unnamed narrator that tragedy of some kind looms…

This is going to be rather a frustrating review, for two reasons. The first is that the slow revelation of the story and the mysteries within it are what leads the reader to want to keep turning the pages, and so it would be entirely unfair to reveal any more of the plot than I already have. The South American country is probably Peru, although it’s never named. Alarcón himself is Peruvian by birth, although he has lived in America since early childhood. However, he seems to maintain strong links to his Peruvian heritage, and the style of the book feels to me far closer to the Latin American tradition than to mainstream US American fiction. The main action of the book, the revival tour, takes place in 2001 and the civil war seems to have ended a dozen or so years earlier, so Nelson lived through it, but as a very young child. Henry and Patalarga, however, were men at the time, and the political aspects of their play marked them as dissidents. So although the book doesn’t take us deeply into the reasons behind the war, its after-effects hover over the present day, so that we see the nation and its people damaged and scarred and still in the process of anxious healing.

The second reason for the difficulty in reviewing is that I’d love to be able to tell you what the book is about, but frankly I’m not at all sure that I know! Other than the effects of civil war, the strongest theme seems to be of identity, and Alarcón plays with this brilliantly in different ways throughout the book. From Nelson’s longing to be American, through the obvious metaphor of plays and acting, to questions of family, friendship and love, Alarcón seems to be looking at the formation of identity at the personal level. It’s partly a coming-of-age novel, and we see how Nelson is influenced by experience and by the people he becomes close to in his formative years. But we also see the more political side of identity – how in changing political circumstances people are identified by their convictions or their allegiances. Yesterday’s dissident is today’s patriot, and vice versa. Fame is illusory and dependent on circumstance. The best, albeit unsatisfactory, way I can think to sum it up is that we see the formation of individual identity mirroring society’s fracturing and reformation as a result of war.

However, although I found it thought-provoking, I must immediately dispel the idea that is a grim or difficult read. It is written lightly, beautifully indeed, and has humour and warmth all through. There is a love story at the heart of it, and not one you’d expect at all. And it is full of mystery – who is the narrator? Why is he telling Nelson’s story? What is the looming tragedy that is foreshadowed again and again as the narrator takes us close to the truth and then veers away again? It’s wonderfully done, and makes what could have been a heavy read into a page-turner, and when the ending came I found it surprising and satisfying, and it left me with my thoughts even more provoked. Is the message perhaps that our stories are an integral part of our identities, and that to tell another’s story is a form of theft? I don’t know. I don’t know. But I loved it, every single word.

www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in an unnamed Latin American country in 2001, I eventually figured out this was Peru. The NY Times review said " this ... is set in a country that if not quite the author’s native Peru is at least a first cousin". This is not a spoiler because if you look up the writer's bio, you read he was born in Lima, Peru in 1977. I loved his first book Lost City Radio, and this, his second novel, did not disappoint me. The story centers on the revival of a traveling theater troupe, made up of only 3 men, who leave "the city" and travel through the countryside and up into the mountains performing a revival of a play by a guerilla theater troupe that got the playwright, Henry Nuñez jailed as a terrorist in the 80's. The play is not particularly profound - a satirical view of an unnamed ruler. Henry was imprisoned for less than a year, but this experience impacted him for life.
The book opens with a description of the city as it is now, and how it was during the "war". The new calm and relative prosperity make it difficult to comprehend that this was a place that saw so much turmoil less than two decades earlier. This description rang very true to me. It was how I felt when visiting Belfast in 2009, and walking around downtown. I'd been there a number of times during the Troubles and it was difficult to believe this was the same city. I had a similar reaction to Santiago, Chile, when I visited there for the first time in 1999. Although it was many years after the coup and upheavals of the 70's and 80's (something I only knew through books,films, and Chilean friends) in the late 90's Chile was a rising economy.
The isolation of rural and Andean life comes through strongly in this novel. It makes sense that the two older members of the troupe, Henry and Patalarga ("big foot") would undertake this trip, but why does Nelson, the younger member, only in his early 20's join them? Alarcon makes his motivation very believable, even palpable. Nelson is in love with Ixla, but torn between staying in the city, his country, and leaving for the United States.
The story ends tragically. I had to reread the last two pages, to decipher what it meant.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's just something about South American literature that I like and find unique. It's almost a surreal, dream-like quality to the writing and the storytelling and I certainly felt that again with Daniel Alarcon's At Night We Walk in Circles. While the title of the novel is briefly explained, it does a good job of summing up the book. It has a meandering and circular nature to it, or at least "full circle" moments when it comes to the fates of different characters -- both literally and figuratively.

But while I enjoyed Alarcon's prose, characters, and some of the storytelling where the novel fell short for me was pulling it all together and just pulling it off, period. The novel delicately balances on a tease. Early on the reader is aware the protagonist is not going to have a happy ending, we just don't know what it is. But Alcaron presents like we do know, that we live in the novel's unnamed South American country and have read/seen news accounts of the event that have transpired in the book. He does an excellent job in building up this tension, but alas for me the reveal ended up being a bit of a bust. Or as one of my favorite sayings goes: the anticipation of an event is often greater than the event itself.

Additionally (and trying to keep this spoiler-free) even the events leading up to the end bent my credibility farther than it was willing to go. It is not that I am unwilling to bend, but if an author makes me think about would happen logically and realistically (even if/when it's not), they haven't quite fully done the job.

Overall, a bit frustrating as there were many elements to this book that I really did like, but having read this during the Sochi Winter Olympics, the analogy I am left with is how important it is -- regardless of whatever proceeds it and however good it was -- to stick the landing.

[Liz Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel blessed that this year has seen new work out by Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I could almost throw in Junot Diaz even though that was last year, and now Daniel Alarcón. I feel that each author brings something new to the page and that their craft is only getting better and better. I loved this story and the way it was told. It has the bare bones of a mystery but it goes deeper. It spins around what can happen if we shut our eyes for just a moment, or make what might seem like an innocuous decision, at the time, but then life begins to spin slowly out of control. It's only in the final pages we find out what went on and it's not what I was expecting. I found myself easily caught up in the action and caught up with the characters. It's all so believable and sad all at once.

[Chaitra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel Alarcon does foreshadowing very well. Unfortunately it's works a bit too well, and the end does not come soon in off for the pay-off to feel as big as it was meant to be. The book is about a young man named Nelson, who has had a few setbacks in life, who finally lands a role in a play written by a hero of his called Henry Nunez. Now Henry was imprisoned for performing the very play, and has only now made a small overture towards getting back to the life that he'd long since left off. The war is done, and in peace they think it might be a good idea to go touring into the interiors, but the war hasn't been erased the way it has been in the capital. Bad things are going to happen to Nelson, we know it, but it takes a while coming. He's a good writer, so I think I'll have a better time reading Alarcon's book of short stories.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Literature arising out of South America is like no other. There is a hallucinatory quality which crosses borders, blending the magic realism of gabriel garcia marquez with politically charged horrors. In this book, as in works such as Death and the Maiden and Bel Canto, the country is unnamed since the political uprisings share similarities. This novel focuses on Nelson, a young actor seemingly unable to get his career in gear, and the nameless narrator who finds himself presenting Nelson's story for an article he's writing. Original in structure, the plot meanders with more intrigue than usual. For the most part, I enjoyed how the skeins of plot unravelled, and recommend it highly despite the ambiguity of the final product.

[Bryan Edelmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Sometimes you just know the moment you pick it up that it's exactly written just for you. It literally took me over a month to finish this, but in actuality I ripped through it in only a few sittings. Whenever I would pick this up (without fail) I genuinely felt spoken to. Or maybe understood. I don't know. I like to mark up my books, and let me tell you this thing has been absolutely mauled. Truly one of the most beautifully written stories I've ever read.
I'm going to let this sit at a 9/10 for a little while at least and see if I want to bump it up to a 10 later, because it is honestly so special and important to me. The only thing keeping me from that last bump is the ending. I am still left unsure why it ends the way it does. Tonally it feels like a different kind of story than the rest of the book, but not in a way that it comes out of nowhere. It could be that I just didn't see the subtext that I may have missed earlier, or it could be that I'm not fully thinking about these characters and why they would act this way right here at the end.
I would love to say that I recommend this book to everyone, but it feels like trying to introduce people to your best friend or something. I want everyone to feel and understand the connection we share and how great they are, but to hear they don't feel the same way would be heartbreaking.

[Tiago Germano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Verdadeira aula de como conduzir o leitor e criar ou trair suas expectativas, não apenas quanto às reviravoltas de trama e enredo dos personagens, mas à própria estrutura que oculta este engenhoso narrador-repórter, que aos poucos vai se revelando e mostrando sua participação na história. Muito animado a buscar o outro romance do autor, publicado aqui no Brasil pela Rocco.

[🎰 · Rating 3 out of 5]

i feel like there was a lot of fire craft/structure but something was missing…hm

[Cleo · Rating 3 out of 5]

"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, 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."

At first, At Night We Walk in Circles wasn't as good as I thought it would be. It progressed slowly, and wasn't that riveting. After the first twenty pages, I didn't feel the need to keep reading. But the novel definitely had its points, and got better as it went on. Still, I didn't find it a great book, despite its very intriguing premise, which seemed like a mix of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards and something else. After all, we have an interesting, enigmatic narrator who's not being quite honest about who he is. The narrator of At Night We Walk in Circles is obsessed with Nelson for some reason, and he's perhaps "closer to it than he lets on." I think this was a great narrative point of view, as we can see this mysterious other man investigating and we read about Nelson's work and his fate.

Still, I feel like a lot more could have been done with this book, and it didn't totally live up to its potential. Yes, the writing is pretty interesting, but you can tell from the writing that Daniel Alarcon thinks he's brilliant and innovative, which I'm not so sure about. Though there were some passages, some turns of phrase, that I really enjoyed reading. I can't quite put my finger down on why At Night We Walk in Circles wasn't so compelling to me. Perhaps it's that the book is a bit short on action, and it's certainly not "compulsively readable" as the blurb boasts.Yes, things happen, but they're interspersed with a little too many unnecessary reflections and meditations. The story itself was also very odd, and perhaps oddly told. I couldn't quite fathom the narrator's fascination with Nelson, or why he was so bent on tracing his roots, talking to everyone involved with him, or even anyone who had met him once or twice. Nelson didn't seem like a really interesting person, so I knew that indeed the narrator must be more connected to him.

As I read on, I also realized that At Night We Walk in Circles felt kind of overwritten to me. There were dense paragraphs with (somewhat) flowery turns of phrase that I caught myself skimming over, despite some of them being interesting. Still, there were some sections of the book that I liked okay, and the story, while odd, was certainly interesting enough and fairly original. It was also kind of bizarre, but in a good way, and I liked that the novel took place in an unnamed but somewhat typical South American country under rebellion, where Henry Nunez's plays are banned. But now there's revival with Nelson in it, and as you might expect that's where the real trouble begins. It's also where the novel starts to get better and more interesting.

There were some great, bizarre passages in the book, such as the way Nunez and his sister have invented a laughing game to help get out of trouble. That was so funny, and there were other odd moments like that that worked very well, and kind of redeemed the book. As often happens, the second half was much, much better, and the story picked up too.

I certainly didn't love At Night We Walk in Circles, but it wasn't a horrible book either. I really loved the idea of it, with its interesting title and oddball plot; it sounded like a perfect mix of the literary, the mysterious, and the entertaining. It just didn't work so well for me, although it might for other people. I ended up liking it, although it could have been better. I received an ARC from Riverhead Books; the novel doesn't come out until October 31st.

www.novareviews.blogspot.com

[Sarai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written, but excessively long. There was a lot of build up and foreshadowing with an unsatisfying outcome that didn't make up for all of the pages and pages of unnecessary details/events that you have to page through.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another novel that shouldn’t work but does. Alarcon is best at movement rather than form or structure or characterization. His greatest skill is to turn slow-moving stories just before they run into a wall. The uninteresting narrator is difficult to fathom, and he becomes more important as the novel moves on, but not more interesting. And yet he is a singular narrator, and interesting for that reason. There is nothing that special about the prose, although there are some very special moments.

[Carl R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read Daniel Alarcon's fantastic War by Candlelight and Lost City Radio, seeing an occasional something from him in The New Yorker or elsewhere and wondering when the next big one was coming. I was passing by my favorite neighborhood bookstore a couple of weeks ago, and, lo! A window full of At Night We Walk in Circles, along with a notice about a soon-to-come reading by my favorite local author.

I presented myself at the affair early enough to buy a copy and grab a seat near the front and was well-rewarded for my diligence. Not only did Alarcon provide a terrific intro to the book itself but a fascinating story or two about its creation. I hadn't seen anything from him because this novel was years and years aborning. He thought he'd finished it in 2010, he said, though he wasn't all that happy with it. He decided to show it to a couple of friends with the expectation that they might say he was being too hard on himself. But no. They confirmed his negativity, and he dumped all but about ten pages and started over. He described as well his chilling experiences as an instructor in the brutal Peruvian prison system, a location that is crucial to the book. Finally, in response to a question, he went into his personal life as a Spanish/English/American/Peruvian. That might have been the best part of the talk. Every part of his identity is organic. There's no split. I envy him that. He sets his stories in an unnamed country because he wants complete freedom to roam, to invent characters, locations, events, without being tied to the real world. He was born in Peru, moved to Birmingham (Alabama, not England) with his doctor parents early on, spoke Spanish at home, when to an accelerated high school. And there he is, and here is At Night We Walk in Circles.

First thing to remember is that this is a novel with a narrator telling the stories of the main characters. Like all such novels, the characters operate as vehicles of the narrator's imagination. Gatsby, for example, is a creation of Nick Carraway. The second thing to remember is that this is a book about the theater. In the 1980's, Henry, the founder/leader/playwright of Diciembre is tossed into prison for writing and performing a play called The Idiot President. In 2001, he's out of prison and driving a cab. Since these are less censorious times, he lets himself get talked into reviving the play and taking on a tour of the provinces--villages scattered along the Andes, mainly. Enter young Nelson, a devotee of Henry's, who ends up being cast in a central role, and off the troupe goes.

Near the beginning, we're given to understand that something happens to Nelson on this tour, but we're not told what. We're also not told who the narrator is. Alarcon claims that he himself didn't decide until very late in the game who the storyteller is. Whatever the truth of the matter, these twin mysteries pull us through the action like a needle pulling a thread through fabric. When will the "it" happen? What will it be?

In the meantime, we move from town to town in almost picaresque fashion, meeting new characters and circumstances as we go, and experiencing the characters getting to know each other, dealing with their pasts, with the people and places they've left behind in the city, and watching how their performances of the intriguing play shape their attitudes and their characters.

It would be giving far too much away to reveal what does happen to Nelson, but suffice it to say, it's a theatrical even that breaks through that fourth wall into an entirely separate reality. Alarcon manages the complex whole with a fine-tuned ear for irony, humor, and pathos. I have no idea what was on all those pages he tossed in 2010, but what's between the 2013 covers of At Night We Walk In Circles, is a painful and exhilarating literary experience.