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    Lost City Radio: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Lost City Radio: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Lost City Radio: A Novel
    Ebook375 pages6 hours

    Lost City Radio: A Novel

    By Daniel Alarcón

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “Daniel Alarcon writes about subterfuge, lies, and the arbitrary recreation of history with a masterful clarity. By accepting the premise that war is senseless, he goes on to make sense of the lives that are destroyed in its wake. Lost City Radio is both ambitious and resonant.” — Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and The Dutch House

    In his critically acclaimed debut novel, award winning author Daniel Alarcón vividly portrays an anonymous nation searching for its identity at the end of a war with no clear right or wrong.

    For ten years, Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios—a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio, she reads the names of those who have disappeared—those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decade long bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to forever change—thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband.

    Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on society to the emotional scarring each survivor carries for years after. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061748707
    Unavailable
    Lost City Radio: A Novel
    Author

    Daniel Alarcón

    Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru, in 1977 and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of the story collection War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and Lost City Radio, winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize. His writing has appeared in Granta, n+1, McSweeney’s and Harper’s, and he has been named of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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    Reviews for Lost City Radio

    3.5/5

    120 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wow. Read this book.
    • 4/5
      Impressive novel that deals with the personal toll civil war takes on individuals. It is part dystopia, but clearly inspired by Peruvian (and more generally American nations) history with internal violence. Norma's effort to sort through the disinformation and the temptation we all feel to accept the more comfortable lie that the bitter truth strikes an authentic note. I'll keep an eye out for more from Alarcon.
    • 5/5
      Harsh. Incredible. How can this be a debut novel?
    • 4/5
      In an unnamed city in an unnamed South American country, Norma is the beloved on-air host of “Lost City Radio,” where the nation’s lost and tormented souls try to reconnect with loved ones they’ve lost track of. It is ten years since the most recent civil war ended – at least officially. But people still live in fear of reprisal and even Norma’s show isn’t immune to the sort of self-censorship that comes from self-preservation. Norma’s husband is among the missing, and she daren’t read his name aloud.

      The powerful thing about this book is that it is so universal. While it takes place in South America, it could take place in many countries around the world. Alarcon explores what it means to live in constant fear, trusting no one, afraid that any small slip of the tongue may mark you as the enemy or a collaborator, leaving you second-guessing every small gesture or the posture of that stranger on the street you’ve seen once too often recently. His use of the orphan boy, Victor, to trigger the memories of the adults he comes across is an effective technique. For like most children, Victor’s needs are simple and immediate. He doesn’t understand the larger implications of his mission to take a list of missing from his small mountain village to the large city radio station. He only knows that he is alone, and that this is his chance to find his father.

      Alarcon mixes tenses fluidly and sometimes within one paragraph. A remark or smell will trigger a memory and the text follows the character’s wandering mind as he or she remembers something that happened in the past. Then, just as suddenly as awakening from a dream, the action is back in the present and we are back on the bus headed for the city, or back in the café having lunch. It sounds as if this would be very confusing, but Alarcon is skilled at making this device work wonderfully.

      In the end, only the reader knows what happened to one missing person, while being left to wonder what will happen to the many.
    • 4/5
      Lost City Radio by Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón is a haunting and tragic story set during the recent aftermath of a brutal civil war that tore apart an unnamed country in South America. Norma hosts a radio program called Lost City Radio. Each night she goes on the air and reads the names of people who went missing or were displaced by the war. The names are provided by her legions of loyal listeners from throughout the country who live in the hope that by having the names read on the radio they will be reunited with their missing loved ones. Occasionally reunions take place, and Norma’s producer stages these during the show for maximum dramatic effect. Norma has kept her own desperate and fading hope alive for ten years: the hope that her husband Rey, who went missing in the final days of the war, will return to her. However, she cannot safely utter his name on the air because, as an accused rebel collaborator, he is still officially wanted by the authorities, and this is a country where a vigilant and uneasy government is always watching and listening. Everything changes when a boy named Victor arrives at the station after a lengthy journey from his home—an obscure village in the forest—bearing a list of names for Norma to read, a list that includes Rey. Rey, a biologist with a fascination for medicinal plants, visited the forest often, and as Norma gains Victor’s trust the boy reveals things about Rey’s time in the forest that Norma never suspected and which change her perspective on the past she shared with him. Alarcón’s narrative cleverly reconstructs Rey’s past piece by piece as Norma learns more of his activities while in the forest and as she recalls the intimacy of their early courtship and eventual marriage. Alarcón evokes a tense post-war society where danger lurks around every corner and no one is truly safe. Lost City Radio is a suspenseful and powerful novel, one that builds to an explosive climax, and in the process depicts in frightening and agonizing detail the human cost of war.
    • 4/5
      I just didn't find this all that interesting. It seemed like he was always building things up like there would be some great reveal or intrigue and there just never was. It's not that I don't like books where everyone is ordinary and nothing surprising happens, but this made me feel like there was supposed to be something surprising and it was all just predictable and ordinary instead.
    • 3/5
      Lost City Radio is a mesmerizing story, well told, but the style is just plain sophomoric. Of course, Daniel Alarcon gets tons of critical acclaim as a writer for whom English is a second language - perhaps too much acclaim. It may have gone to his head and led him to believe that he doesn't need to polish and fine-tune his prose, that it's good enough to just pick the nearest word and string along a few of them into a coherent sentence to get his point across. This is a disservice to both a young author and literature in general. Writing in a second language is not an excuse - the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, and Jerzy Kozinski had succeeded at it. Whether Alarcon has talent as a writer remains to be seen. With his indisputable talent as a storyteller, he might do well as a screenwriter - as long as the studio heads bring in somebody to polish up the dialogue.
    • 3/5
      I am not a subscriber. Alarcon has talent and I sympathize with his politics; but something was missing from "Lost City Radio." Perhaps the characters were just a bit too similar; perhaps the all-pervasive traumatized vacancy offered too little traction or perhaps everything was knit together just a bit too tightly. The novel needed to surge somehow, in some direction or around something; but it lingered and reminisced; at most, it brooded."The war had bred a general exhaustion. It was a city of sleepwalkers now, a place where another bomb hardly registered, where the Great Blackouts were now monthly occurrences, announced in vitriolic pamphlets slipped beneath windshield wipers like shopping circulars." Fair enough. Alarcon communicates that successfully. But in his world of characters about whom a reader should care very much, Alarcon gives his readers too many reasons to disengage. However, on a syllabus about fascism, totalitarianism, and the psychological impact of terrorism and government surveillance, maybe alongside some Hannah Arendt, this book would certainly have its place: very teachable.
    • 3/5
      Hurray for wonderful book club members that create interesting lists and select good books.I enjoyed Lost City Radio. I didn't really adore it, but I read it quickly and found very little fault with it. It struck me as a novel that junior high or high school teachers might encourage their students to read as a means of introducing them to certain historical events, and it would be an excellent way to do this. And I don't mean that as a slight that some people intend when they assign books to a certain age group or something. I'm not saying that only eighth-graders should read this, but it made me somewhat feel like I was back in school and about to study a South American civil war.On top of that, I often find a certain similarity in the tone of stories that focus on missing loved ones, particularly when we're talking about situations like this where a Latin/South American country suffers civil war and many disappear. It's horrific and sad and so very upsetting to live with the knowledge that there will never be closure to the feeling of loss... It's one of those things that I cannot possibly comprehend and I hope I never will.So, the story. This novel focuses on three characters in an unnamed country, weaving back and forth through time as we eventually learn about what (predictably) links them together. While our focus remains on these and a handful of others, the two main locations are the jungle and the city. The circumstances of the civil war and the country are vague, which means we bring in our own vague knowledge of many Latin/South American countries that have experienced civil wars, dictators, rebel armies, and mass disappearances that foster a culture of fear. And because of that, we automatically have ourselves a scenario and we're free to focus on what this means to our characters and what it does to change their lives.First and foremost, we have Norma. Norma hosts "Lost City Radio," a Sunday radio program where callers phone with names and descriptions of missing loved ones. While her face might not be known to the country, it's practically impossible for her to speak outside of the radio without being identified. The people love her. She is repeatedly stopped and handed lists of names to be read on her show. Lost City Radio is often the site for staged reunions and everyone in the country seems to tune in, desperate to locate their own missing family, friends, and loved ones.Norma's own husband is one of the missing, though she cannot speak his name on the air without fear of some action being taken. Possibly a member of the rebel group, the IL, Rey was a man who was taken into custody and imprisoned on the very night that he met Norma. He was released and met her once more a year later, so Norma returns to this fact constantly as an excuse for why she cannot quite let go. His ability to disappear and reappear in her life became so ingrained with their relationship that even now, ten years later, she cannot help but hope. She does not know how involved he was with a rebel movement and deluded herself into believing that her husband was a man who kept no secrets.The third character that we have is young Victor, an eleven-year-old boy who is sent by his village to see Norma and bring her the list of their village's missing. His mother has just died, he never knew his father, and his teacher (who accompanied him to the city) appears to have abandoned him at the radio station, so Norma takes charge of him and it is at that point where we begin our story.Overall, I enjoyed the book, though most everything came as a given in the plot. A weaving storyline will do that, as you assume certain things to fill in the gaps and then, when you double-back, your assumptions are confirmed. Thus, you're thankful that Alacron is a good storyteller and you're compelled to finish the novel based on that alone, because you know what's going to happen. I found this to be one of those books where you don't shed tears, and yet you still feel sadness pervading every page. It's a constant emotion in the book, despite small bursts of anxiety, fear and even some joy, as we're looking back on events that cannot be changed, and it's only once we reach the end that we look forward to what can be done.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It was beautiful and haunting. The writing was heartbreaking, poignant and will stay with me for a very long time.
    • 4/5
      Dense, tight writing both highlight and hold this book down. The story of a radio host in a nameless South American city changes places and time frames, and it is rather difficult to get a grip on it all, but I eventually was coping with the style. Emotional and complex, but at times slow.