At the beginning of 2007, when the British magazine Granta selected Daniel Alarcón as one of the most prominent young American writers, more than one person asked, “American? But Alarcón is Peruvian!” Indeed he is, but he has spent most of his life in the United States: he grew up in Alabama, studied in New York, and currently lives in California. Alarcón is a lot like his work: from here, but also from there.

Just a few months later, Alarcón was selected to be part of another exclusive group: Bogotá39, the elite that represent the best Latin American writers under 39. “Latin American? But Alarcón writes in English!” While that is true, Peru appears in all his works. It is a Peru he did not grow up in, but one he absorbed from his family, and, eventually, when it was time for him to (re)visit, after the violence was no more, it was a Peru he already knew.

The promising young talent, the “new voice,” was no longer “up-and-coming”; he had arrived. And his awaited first novel, Radio Ciudad Perdida (Alfaguara, 2007; Lost City Radio, HarperCollins, 2007), only reaffirmed that.

The lost city

Alarcón left Peru when he was only three years old. Aside from family visits as a youngster—almost annually until 1989, when they stopped because of the violence there—Alarcón went back for the first time in 1999 and stayed for four months. He returned in 2001, that time living for almost a year in San Juan de Lurigancho, one of the most marginal neighborhoods in Lima. It is from this experience that he “reconstructed” his novel, which took him almost three years to write.

The framework of the novel is the past civil war of an unnamed country that could well be Peru, ten years after the confrontations between the army and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). “The fact that I was not living in Peru during those peculiar, such violent years, has to do with that obsession,” Alarcón tells Críticas regarding this recurring theme, prevalent in all his writings. “Had I stayed, my adolescence would have taken place during those years. I wanted to know what happened, what it was that I didn’t live,” he says. “I wanted to reconstruct my life as a negative, and that made me continue with those themes,” though he readily admits they won’t be his obsession forever.

Reexamining his stay in Peru, Alarcón recalls a scenario that still persists in Lima: migrant families fill the capital, displaced from inland areas. “There is always somebody leaving, there is always somebody coming. It’s like a bus station.”

Now living in Oakland, CA, Alarcón recalls clearly what brought him back to Peru that second time. “I went with the idea of writing about the identity of marginalized youth, which replicates that of many in other major cities: young people who live in a globalized world that has experienced plenty of migratory movements,” he says. “[In Peru], kids were not listening to salsa, Andean music, or folklore; they were listening to electronica or reggaeton. It was fascinating.”

But the original project is not what he had in the end. “War was always coming up. The violence that those people lived was always looming. This was not just any place, but one that had lived a war.”

His memories are powerful indeed. “One day, while chatting, a man asked me what I did, and I told him I’d studied anthropology. A bit later, he came back with a list. It was a list of the deceased people from his town, and he was bringing it to me because he thought maybe I could excavate and find their dead….”

A foreigner among us

A list. That is precisely how Radio Ciudad Perdida begins. Victor, an 11-year-old boy comes from the jungle with a list. He brings the names of the people who disappeared in his town and wants Norma, the host of a successful radio show that reunites families with missing loved ones, to read his list on the air. The civil war had ended ten years earlier, the same number of years that Norma has gone without news from her husband, Rey.

The novel is packed with real elements, personal ones and those of others. The radio show did exist (and still does), and Alarcón used to listen to these reunion stories when he lived in San Juan de Lurigancho. On the other hand, the novel is dedicated to his uncle, who disappeared in 1989 during Sendero Luminoso’s most intense period.

The Spanish version of Lost City Radio arrived in Peru this past July, exactly one year after Alarcón presented his first book of short stories, which was a huge success at the Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL) de Lima (Lima International Book Fair). This year, the author was again at that fair and the theater was packed. He anxiously anticipated the opinion of the local critics. The idea of being rejected because he was “the foreigner that talks about us” did not sound impossible. “I thought there would be disapproval because I was someone that ‘from the outside’ was talking about things that happened [in Peru]. And those criticisms would have been justified; I did not live what I wrote,” he says.

Clearly, the experiences Alarcón recounts come alive in his text, despite his “foreigness.” And that may be why his writing appeals to a general and widespread audience. “Any work that is well written—regardless of where it develops or the author’s nationality—is universal,” Peruvian writer Iván Thays, also member of Bogotá39, tells Críticas. “The work of a great author—and Alarcón’s is such, no doubt—transcends individual and collective borders.”

On the top of the tongue

Though Alarcón now speaks perfect Spanish, it wasn’t always the case. In his house in Birmingham, his parents used to speak to him in Spanish and, even though he understood them, he would answer in English. It wasn’t until he moved to New York City, where he studied anthropology at Columbia University, that he purposefully tried to recover his mother tongue.

“My cousin came for a visit and brought me a present,” he recalls. “When I grabbed it, I said, ‘te [lo] agradezco, aunque no tengo por qué’ (“Thanks, though I don’t have to”).” Though he realized he was saying something wrong, he “didn’t know how to fix it. I was trying to tell her that she shouldn’t have bothered.” He experienced many such “tragicomic situations” until finally he said, “that’s it.” Alarcón started taking a Spanish course (“we were all immigrants or immigrants’ children who spoke terribly”) and afterward continued alone on his adventure.

He works so well in both languages now that it’s a wonder whether this dualism causes any kind of conflict. “There is a certain need for integration that is important for me…. The person who knows me in one language [only] doesn’t know me well. My self in English without my self in Spanish is somehow incomplete.” But Alarcón says his concern is limited to the personal, and that on a professional level, there is no problem: the concerns are the same, just expressed in different languages.

On the horizon

That said, the question that begs is whether he will soon write in Spanish. “I sometimes think that I could do it. But it’s so hard to perfect language that I wonder whether writing in Spanish would only be a distraction from the task at hand.” Alarcón says he’s meticulous, “very careful of every sentence” he writes. “After many years, many readings of many books, I know when a sentence is accomplished. To achieve that in Spanish would take me many years.”

With his 2007 agenda filled with trips to present his novel (in two languages, two tours, plus, a trip to the Middle East as a cultural ambassador), Alarcón finds little time to write. “I need a routine, to wake up every day at the same time, go to my office, and write. I started a novel, or a long short story, last March, but I won’t be able to go back to it until January,” he says of his next piece, revealing only that this time for sure, it’ll be about migration.

Books by Daniel Alarcón Guerra en la penumbra. (War by Candlelight) (2005) Rayo: HarperCollins ISBN 978-0-06075-887-5 Radio Ciudad Perdida. (Lost City Radio) (2007) Alfaguara: Santillana ISBN 978-9972-232-66-4<