Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Real But Not Really

Seemingly trivial events have profoundly decisive consequences: A thirteen year old gets a little drunk and thereby becomes a terrorist. A young woman attends a party and falls for the terrorist. A boy’s mother makes a misstep while doing the laundry in a jungle river and drowns; the boy is launched into an entirely alien world of the woman who longs for the terrorist. This is the hopeless desolation of a sort of Thomas Hardy country in Peru. Hapless tragedy with a Spanish accent. No one comes out whole.

“No one knew how bad it would get.” Not the man, the woman, the boy, or the entire Peruvian nation as they slid imperceptibly into the irreversible chaos of civil war. The continuity of existence was simply lost. Even the names of de-populating towns and villages were legally erased. The old languages are no longer spoken. Identity consists solely of distorted fragments of unreliable memory.

But memory itself is dangerous. After all “the country was now in the process of forgetting the war ever happened at all.” Official policy is to forget. It is necessary to forget in order to renew memory. And even the boy realizes the risks of remembering: “Happiness, he’d decided, was a kind of amnesia.” Should one even seek the lost and disappeared? After ten years, surely the people we knew are gone even if their bodies have survived.

Everyone has a list of their missing relatives, friends, and colleagues. Lost City Radio is a program for finding missing people, for matching the seekers with the sought. But what does that mean? Is it as simple as matching lists? “How do you tell them it’s a show? Lost City Radio is real, but not real.” Other than acting as a focus for nostalgic longing, it only raises hopes for the impossible. The past is not only past; it never happened the way it’s remembered. The lists are of people not identities.

The truth is that the war has created a universal restlessness - about identity as well as place. No one wants to be where, or who, they are. Those in the jungle and mountains long for escape to the city. Those already in the peripheral slums of the city want to escape to the relative luxury of its center. Those in the center want to escape the fear of losing everything. And perhaps the missing want to stay that way. Identity is a dangerous thing; it can carry unwanted baggage.. Torture tends to make identity memorable but only uncomfortably so.

Memory, like history itself, is indeed real but not real. This is an incurable sadness.

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