Sunday, May 5, 2013

Red April


 
RED APRIL
Edith Grossman's translation of Santiago Roncagliolo’s award-winning novel "Abril rojo" is a great read. The book is a Kafkaesque murder mystery about one man's journey into the horror that has lingered in Peru after the rise and fall of the Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path], a rural Maoist revolutionary group.

The story takes place in a rural township in the foothills of the Andes during March and April 2000. Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a civil servant who was raised in Lima. A year before, however, this minor functionary had asked for and had received a transfer back to the town of his birth in rural Peru. His main professional concern is to quietly and inoffensively succeed within the local federal bureaucracy. His other ambitions are to be a good son to his mother and to win the heart of a local waitress that he just met.

As Holy Week 2000 approaches, he is forced to investigate a particularly gruesome murder. As a result he is drawn into the world around him. This is a world which still harbors some of the social and political horrors that have been a part of Peru’s history before, during and after the rise of the Shining Path in the 1980s.

Chacaltana changes as the novel progresses from a milk-toast civil servant to someone like the inhabitants of the world around him; people who yearn “for a kind of power, a kind of domination, the feeling that something was weaker than he was, that in the midst of this world seemed to swallow him [Chacaltana] whole, he too could have strength, potency, victims.” The novel has an ending that is unexpected but satisfactory.

Like I said, this book is a great read, and I heartily recommend it. Edith Grossman’s translation is, as always, excellent, Roncagliolo was born and raised in Peru. He discusses growing up during this sad time in “Deng’s Dogs.” The essay can be found in the aptly named “Horror” issue of “Granta” 117. By the way, Roncagliolo left Peru to live in Barcelona, Spain in 2000. "April rojo" was first published in 2006. Grossman's translation was first published 2009.

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