Far From Brooklyn

Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon

This is an admirable book.  But not a very good one.

It’s a promising set-up – in a traumatized, unnamed (Latin American) society, one of the biggest radio stars is a woman who reads the names of of people who have disappeared during a wrenching civil war.

But sometimes premises have a way of wrapping themselves too tightly around everything else in a novel.  In this case, the premise squeezes the plot backwards in time – naturally, the passion, action must take place in the war, not in the deadened aftermath of war.

“Deadened” describes the entire tone of the book.  It’s funereal and slow.  After all, a deadened (omniscient) voice would be best suited for a traumatized world – flat, affectless, earnest in the extreme.

The characters, too, are squeezed into service of the story and the setting – they aren’t characters, not really, just ideas for characters, characteristics pieced together to resemble characters.

In all, it felt flat and fake and dull.

However, Alarcon’s first book, of short stories, was supposed to be super, so I’ll try to get to them at some point.