Prizewinner from Peru is Compulsive Reading
Posted by: Nick DiMartino
I lucked out! It’s what every reading addict hopes and prays will happen – the book you bring home for the weekend turns out to be the perfect choice as it takes over your life. I’ve only got 60 pages left, and I’m just making myself stop long enough to jot down this blog before I settle in for the final stretch.
It’s a prizewinning novel from Peru called Red April, by a new literary star, Santiago Roncagliolo, coming out at the end of April from Pantheon. As soon as I saw that Edith Grossman, premiere translator of Spanish literature, had translated it, I snatched it to take home with me for the weekend. Flipping through the pages was a tad daunting. Lots of proper names and titles. And the stark red cover isn’t exactly inviting – its only decoration being a tiny heart of the Virgin mother with the seven daggers of sorrow.
The first couple paragraphs at first seem strangely stilted, with words too big for their sentences, until you realize it’s a parody of an official document written by a very earnest but slightly dim fellow. Grossman’s translation here is subtle and delightful. But the report is just a tease before you meet the central character and the reason to have this whole reading experience – Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar, as delightful and winsome a hero as I’ve followed in some time, an honest little bureaucrat who sincerely believes in the law, is frightened of terrorists, and still honors his dead mother, bringing her photo to the table for each meal and promising her new pajamas.
When a peasant finds himself sleeping in a hayloft with a burned corpse who has a crucifix carved into his forehead, the peasant naturally flees in terror, dumping the mystery into the hands of Ayacucho’s nervous, rule-abiding prosecutor Felix.
From humor verging on slapstick, as the prosecutor’s three attempts to enter a maximum security prison, to the anguish of a mother searching for her son’s body in a mass grave, Red April never stops surprising. One minute it’s an absurdist Kafkaesque satire and political comedy, the next it’s a colorful folkloric celebration, shifting gears to the nightmarish outpost village elections with gunfire and grisly hangings in the street, followed by meek Felix’s comic attempts to win over the lovely young girl in the restaurant where he never stays long enough to eat lunch. His blind fearlessness in the face of the military, and particularly the powerful and dreaded Commander Carrion, are utterly endearing if occasionally cause for serious nail-biting. It’s a frightening world in the Peru outside of Lima, where not all the citizens speak Spanish and laws are not for everyone. It’s a world where Felix meddling in the name of the law might actually be responsible for a man’s death.
Along with everything else, the tourist-crowded Holy Week processions and celebrations in Ayachucho are being stalked by a killer with a sense of Biblical irony and a revenge scheme that feels like the Sendero Luminoso has come back to terrible life. Each victim is missing a different limb. Frankly I’m afraid the priest is going to be next. Brave, nervous Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is heading down into the church’s basement right now, where the crematorium was built by the priests but used for the disappearance of the military’s political enemies. Don’t go down there, Felix! I’ve got a very bad feeling.
Okay, this blog is long enough. Back to my reading armchair.
