“We’re entering the world of the play now, Alejo, its constructed universe. Give in to it.” That’s what Henry, a character in Daniel Alarcón’s second novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, tells his young acolyte as they head for the mountainous hinterlands, but it might as well be a direct note from Alarcón to his readers. What follows is an intricate story woven from the blurry lines between fact and fiction, cut from the same Modernist cloth as the novels of Roberto Bolaño, the late Chilean writer to whom Alarcón, a Peruvian-born, San Francisco–based writer, has often been compared since his celebrated fiction debut in 2007, Lost City Radio.
Published this week by Riverhead, At Night We Walk in Circles follows Nelson, a young, aspiring actor and playwright, as he becomes entangled with the vestiges of the activist theater troupe Diciembre. It was formed in the 1980s by a group of reactionary students, many of whom were imprisoned or murdered after they staged their controversial comedy The Idiot President. The troupe’s lead actor and playwright, Henry Nuñez, survived, however, and now with another Diciembre alumnus, Patalarga, he’s vowed to resurrect the production on its 15th anniversary. After Nelson, a naïve, idealistic devotee of Diciembre’s since childhood, is cast in the role of the president’s son, Alejo, the three leave the capital city of the South American country where they live—unnamed by Alarcón—and embark on a quixotic tour of the rugged countryside, which still shows signs of the civil war that mobilized the troupe decades earlier.
The story takes a soap-opera-esque turn when the trio arrives in the hometown of Rogelio, a former lover of Henry’s who was murdered because of his activism. There, Rogelio’s siblings coerce Nelson to pose as their brother, in an effort to spare their dying mother from the knowledge that she has outlived her son. Alarcón thus establishes a secondary story so rife with genuine human emotion and actors’ posturing that the reader can no longer clearly delineate life from art.
There are tertiary subplots too—a love triangle between Nelson’s pregnant ex-girlfriend and her brutish new boyfriend; Nelson's longing to escape to America and resentment toward his older brother who expatriated without him—which are scattered but engrossing, as the reader attempts to make sense of the moving parts. It appears that the narrator, an unnamed person whom we eventually learn is a magazine journalist, is trying to piece together the stories, too, reconstructing their time line based on interviews with various characters years later. It explains why the prose sometimes reads like a police report—pocked with gaps and speculation as the novel unfolds.
Although the identity of the narrator adds yet another intriguing layer, the device does come at a price: many of the narrative threads introduced in At Night We Walk in Circles are left frustratingly, tantalizingly untied, because the narrator is too distant from the facts to know the whole story. I was left wanting more of his—and Alarcón’s—richly written chronicle of the principal characters’ lives.
This sacrifice aside, the imperfections in the narrator’s account reinforce the distinction between Alarcón’s work and the war fiction of his Modernist Latin American predecessors. Unlike Bolaño, for instance, Alarcón, who was born in Lima in 1977, roots his story’s action in the aftermath, not the midst, of political turmoil. Our narrator isn’t a first-hand witness to the twists and turns of the plot, just as Nelson’s generation must experience the South American conflicts of the 70s and 80s at a remove, through the people who were adults at the time and through the hints of trouble that remain.