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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

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.