BLOOD OF THE DAWN, Peru's violent past made personal

BLOOD OF THE DAWN
CLAUDIA SALAZAR JIMÉNEZ (tr. Elizabeth Bryer)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Debut novel by Peruvian author viscerally revisits Peru's recent, traumatic history through the eyes of three women

Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as "the time of fear" in Peruvian history, when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in a lucid and brutal prose.

Claudia Salazar Jiménez was born in 1975 in Lima, Peru. She is a critic, a scholar, and an author; she founded PERUFEST, the first Peruvian film festival in New York, where she lives; and she won the 2014 Americas Narrative Prize for this, her debut novel.

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My Review: A nasty proxy war was fought by the US versus the USSR as part of what we in the US are taught to call "the Cold War." How cold is a war whose victims number in the hundreds of thousands in one theater of its coldness, eg Latin America? Are people's families less fractured because no US soldiers (to speak of) were killed? Are those (mostly) men less dead because they weren't casualties of great pitched battles?

One nasty war was the struggle Peruvians fought against Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path in English), a Soviet-backed militia that committed atrocities against ordinary people with seeming success throughout the 1980s. The brutality of the US-backed military's responses to Sendero Luminoso drove some into the rebels' camp, others away from it. In any civil war there are no real winners. This was never more evident than in Peru. Author Salazar Jiménez limns that very clearly by decentering the male (mostly) combatants in favor of three women whose lives are both upended and defined by the conflict.

It's a depressing truth that this book came out in 2016, I read it in 2017, and while I made my notes on it at the time I never wrote them into a review. The biggest part of my failure to review it stems from the stream-of-consciousness narrative vignettes feeling unlinked-up. This is a debut, so it deserves generosity of treatment; however I was very, very irritated by the sense that, if there was a common thread in the background tapestry, I did not see it.

On skimming the story ten years later, I still don't. The PoV women are all enmeshed in the struggles of Peru, none on the government side but Melanie the city-born colonizer-stock photographer is probably closest as photography and its granddaughter filmmaking's very much an outgrowth of bourgeois culture more broadly; her desire to show the world what's happening to her country gets her resoundingly abused by Sendero Luminoso perpetrators. Her narrative voice wasn't distinctive, particularly in (unclear) distinction to Modesta the impoverished country-dwelling Quecha woman's.

That both were raped quite violently (there is no non-violent rape, I'm saying their experiences were even more violent than baseline horror) did not make them more distinguishable in a narrative technique used to emphasize the commonalities of sexualized assault. It served that function. a side-effect of that function is it's more difficult to build specific empathy for that character. As the story progresses, Modesta faces the challenge of carrying then birthing a daughter from her horrifying experience...a daughter she cannot easily or readily bond with. Since I'm more distant emotionally from her by not having a clear sense of her as Modesta but rather as a woman caught in war, it's harder for that horrific truth to make its most intense impact on me-the-reader.

Comrade Marta, the cadre of the Sendero Luminoso, was probably the one easiest to tell apart because she was seeing, participating in, perpetrating, but centrally seeing the violence her group committed as a necessary step to gaining meaningful freedom for the people of Peru. I got why she fell into that way of thinking, but it's always hard to see that path as justified to my bourgeois self. How does killing stop killing? I do not observe that result from those actions anywhere in my own world.

So my rating does not rest primarily on my pleasure in the prose from any angle. I would rate the book two and a half stars were it still 2016 out there. Today we have the US starting bullshit wars to protect a bunch of pedophile rapists from facing the consequences of their crimes instead of simply enriching some scumbags; we have a government so dedicated to white supremacist misogyny as policy instead of more nebulously ideology that voting rights and bodily autonomy are being dismantled as matters of law; we are, in short, more in danger from our government than from any external enemy.

In that sociopolitical milieu this book is four stars of klaxon-sounding warning. Heed these words, understand these threats viscerally by reading this story.

THE YEAR OF THE WIND, responsibility, grief, reconciliation in strife-riven 80s Peru

THE YEAR OF THE WIND
KARINA PACHECO MEDRANO (tr. Mara Faye Lethem)
Graywolf Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical novel depicting the devastating effects of political violence in Peru on three women’s lives

Nina, a Peruvian writer in Spain on the eve of the pandemic, is pulled back into her nation’s fraught history after a fleeting encounter with a woman who is a doppelgänger of Bárbara, a cousin lost to time. The games, the candor, and the secrets of her youth come alive again, but these memories are tinged with disquiet, and what unfolds takes Nina back to a village nestled in the Andes where she must confront the terrors that stalked Peru in the early 1980s. As she travels from Cusco to Apurimac to uncover Bárbara’s fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about Bárbara’s political radicalization and involvement with the Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist group that instigated a bloody period of political violence in which tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians disappeared or were killed.

In her first novel to be translated into English, Karina Pacheco Medrano explores how war transforms family stories and complicates the distinction between prey and hunter. Part bildungsroman, part detective novel, The Year of the Wind records a significant chapter in Peruvian history rarely considered in the literature of political violence, exploring the anonymous stories marked by horror, loss, bewilderment, and, in some cases, redemption.

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My Review: A certain time in a person's life, an age meeting an historical moment, loom large forever after. For Nina, it's the rise of Sendero Luminoso in response to Peru's oligarchic fascism of the day. Authoritarians come in all flavors, and always start by promising change but never quite delivering it...but the promise is enough for some. The sense of acuteness prevalent in late adolescence/early adulthood is omnidirectional, questing, and restless. These people are very likely to fall into traps set by the status quo's defenders...extremism, armed rebellion, terrorism, all tend to reinforce the status quo because the general run of citizens are trained to be more afraid of pretty-unlikely events instead of focusing on quotidian acts of repression and oppression that inspire most revolutions.

Bárbara’s an exception, someone who got radicalized by the awful authoritarian acts taking place. Bárbara’s decision to resist on the ground in practical reality preceded her disappearance; we all know that means death but no closure allowed by the authoritarians to punish the survivors (and create more radicalized people to excuse more violence against the whole country). Nina, now living in Spain, is fiftyish, and runs into a fellow exile whose mere presence sets off the chain reaction of "what was Bárbara’s fate, how can I find out, guess it's finally time to go home" that forms the meat of this interrogation of family, of grief, of responsibility, of consequences.

Who's guilty? Of what? Bárbara’s fate was invited...but was it inevitable? Where does blame for her disappearance lie, the authoritarians in power or the authoritarian-wannabes whose message of change seduced so many into...questionable...acts?

It's told in lovely sentences, structured with many leaps of attention to different times. It's not linear but it does all connect as the jumps happen. It's not suddenly it's 1984 for no particular reason, but because Nina is encountering a trigger of some kind.

I found both prose and structure reinforced my sense of myself moving with Nina as she processed her deep sadness and grief and guilt. She survived a horrible time in Peru's history, and did it not least by escaping Peru. That marks a person, that abandonment, as much as the consequences of staying would do. No one escapes politically violent times unmarked, unfazed, undaunted by doubt. Nina begins her reckoning in his story. Painful questions arise; painful answers meet them; no process offers closure without that asking-answering reconciliation of memory and action.

It's a read I think offers more than it asks in attention. Attentive readers will find guidance from someone who has faced up to the tough realization: I played my part, too.

An excellent novel, strongly recommended.

WHO SINGS TO THE DEAD? (Nina Flores Thrillers #2)
MAX TOMLINSON
Sendero Press
$2.99 Kindle Original, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Who can you trust in a country haunted by its past?

On the hunt for an abducted Indian beggar girl, Peruvian National Police officer Nina Flores is determined to track down the suspected kidnapper, a man who resembles what the locals call pishtacos: tall, pale ghosts who steal children. In spite of being jumped by a mysterious attacker, and the murder of a woman who gets too close to the truth, Nina is blocked at every turn by her superiors. Then she discovers links to a second case reaching back twenty years to the country’s dirty war. Defying the powers that be, Nina forms a shaky alliance with a member of a brutal drug cartel and heads deep into the Amazon jungle. She will bring the lost one home, or die trying.

My Review: My goodness. This is another case of a thriller that thrills, but leaves some nagging questions in the reader's mind. None are fatal to the story. All are significant enough that I feel I must mention them.

I very very much enjoy the Peruvian setting. I love Ninasisa's complete and understated conviction that she can handle any-goddam-thing that Peru, the USA, the narcotraficantes, can dream up to throw at her. The view of the politics of The New Peru is, I am convinced, accurate: Good people trying to make amends and start anew, bad people trying to make a buck and get a piece of the pie, and world leaders silently tolerating what would, in their own countries, cause revolution and outrage.

Weltanschauung = Weltschmerz, I suppose. Frantz Fanon needs to reincarnate in Peru.

Nina, as she is referred to most of the time, is a poor girl from a poor family, who made it into a darn good job because her narco uncle feels bad about her orphanhood and subsidized a US university education for her. He would have preferred that she stay there. She came home and became a Tourist Police officer...an interface between Peru's lawlessness and tourists' expectations of a civilized experience.

Now she's embroiled in a chase, thinking that one of the street kids she looks out for as a form of paying it forward is being pedophilically used after being snatched off the street during Easter Week chaos by an American tourist.

The chase is remarkably slow. Many days go by, a week or more before Nina can get close to the perp. Any police department will tell you that this is a *terrible* sign, no search, no discovery, no demand for ransom within 48 hours maximum usually means it's a recovery mission and not a rescue. Tomlinson makes sure we experience Nina's frustration, which becomes problematic because it's all we experience. There is nothing that impels us to invest in the lost child, since her older sister is the character we see more of and we don't see all that much of her. Common thriller techniques, like dates and times as chapter headings, or short fast chapters, aren't employed here. It leaves out a kind of urgency that can only help readers see how much Nina cares, that she's investing so much time.

Nina's new crush object, after the first book soured her relationship with an earlier paramour, is terribly convenient and quite promising. He is drawn with care to show what about him attracts and then interests a wary, heartsick woman of early middle age. Because he is so sketchily filled in, I can only be morally certain that he's younger than she is. That's certainly not unheard of, and it's clear that Nina possesses the attributes that interest straight men, but it does raise a question I wondered about in the first book: She's in early middle age, at 36, and no one...not one soul...says anything about her being an old maid or a lesbian or boo-turkey about it. In Peru. A Catholic patriarchy.

That ain't bloody likely, more especially since she takes such an interest in the sex workers and children of Cuzco. SOMEone would make a jibe about her getting the kids she never had, looking for a girlfriend among the whores, etc etc etc. Men are like that, and so are some of the cattier women that Nina runs up against.

And the American villains of the piece? Well, sketched in adequately to show why they're villains and what damage they've caused and endured. The ending, however, doesn't hang together where they are concerned, and the final chase scenes lack a sense of more than theatrical stakes because of it.

And finally, a niggle. Something that gets under my saddle and rubs a blister on my hide. PICK A CONVENTION. Italicize Spanish and Quechua, Spanish or Quechua, but not sometimes and then not. Also, choose a single spelling convention, either American (Cuzco) or Peruvian (Cusco). Different between books. That isn't good. Italicize Spanish AND Quechua, or just Quechua (which I'd recommend, since in Peru it's still a second language and that reinforces the Peruvianness of the books). And spellcheck is NOT your friend in Spanish. Barracho doesn't mean anything that I know of.

These are issues that affect fussbudgets like me, though, and only because I'm engrossed in the story and don't want to notice extraneous stuff like that. I like Nina, I like Cuzco, I like where it seems we're headed, and for the price I can't imagine a better deal.


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SENDERO by Max Tomlinson, a good first thriller set in Peru

SENDERO (Nina Flores Thrillers #1)
MAX R. TOMLINSON
Sendero Press
$2.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1987, the dirty war that will last twelve years and kill thirty thousand Peruvians finally reaches up through the Andean cloud forest for Nina and her family. Nina’s father is shot by soldiers, her mother raped, and her brother lost to the shadowy ranks of Shining Path guerrillas. And when Agustín Malqui, the village pastor, files a legal complaint against the military, it’s no surprise when he disappears in the middle of the night—just another casualty of the military regime.

Twenty-odd years later, Nina, now an officer in Cuzco’s tourist police, comes across a familiar name on the police printer that she scans daily for any trace of her long-lost brother. Agustín Malqui is alive. After spending years in a political prison, the broken pastor has been wandering the country, saving souls and drowning his demons in pisco. Nina tracks him down, only to lose him yet again in a police sweep of political malcontents. But before Malqui disappears, he tells her a drunken tale she can scarcely believe: that her brother Miguel is still alive.

Despite warnings and threats from her chief and the pleadings of her lover, an officer in Peru’s anti-terrorist branch, Nina presses on to find Malqui. Her search takes her through Peru’s underworld, from remote villages high in the Andes to the steaming jungle haunts of the narcotraficantes, and ultimately to a secret political prison in the altiplano, where she learns the truth about Malqui and her own vanished brother.

My Review: I've been to Cuzco twice, and Peru three times, in my life. I very much like it there, and I am a big fan of the Andean people's surviving culture. I came to the book ready to love it.

I liked it a whole lot.

There are the accustomed ebook-original glitches, typos and oddly placed punctuation marks and continuity errors. I don't want to dwell on them, but one big one is the last-name change of a major character between books one and two. I sigh, and remove one star.

Ninasisa is a really sympathetic character to build a series of thrillers on, and full marks to Mr. Tomlinson for making her believably damaged by her and her country's fraught past. Nina, as she is known in most of the book, has sustained losses that would wreck a lesser person's entire life. Nina isn't rising above her beginnings, she's building her future on making the beginnings part of it. She never hides or is shamed by her mountain-Indian origins, despite the fact that she's dating a Spaniard (a white Peruvian) from Cuzco's upper classes.

She never forgets that her roots are down low, despite a US university education and a job with the Tourist Police. She could credibly downplay the past, but chooses not to, and that provides a lot of conflict between herself and the class- and race-conscious Peruvian culture. Reading her interactions with the gigantic lower-class majority of Cuzco, the ancient Inca and modern Andean capital, rang very true to me. (My contact with same having been an Andean tour guide who was at pains to inform his American guests of the true nature of poverty.)

I removed one more half-star for the first-time novelist errors of characterization, such as the all-villain-all-the-time bad guys, and the overwhelming goodness of all the womenfolk. It's not tragic, but it informs the ending of the book, which...well...it was certainly dramatic and very well set-up by the rest of the book, but was...pat. Expected. Predictable, if excitingly written.

Make no mistake, this first novel of a series is a very worthwhile way to wile the hours away. If you've never been to Peru, you'll feel like you have after reading this. If you have been to Peru, you'll feel that little pleased jolt when Tomlinson mentions a place you've visited. It's a good read.

Not quite excellent. Not perfect. A good, solid read, delivers on its promise of action, and manages a vivid sense of place. At $2.99 for the Kindle version, it's worth that and more.



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