Red April

Starred review from March 2, 2009
Roncagliolo’s stunning debut, about the brutality of Peruvian society under the Fujimori regime, merits comparison to the work of J.M. Coetzee. In 2000, associate district prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, who’s returned to the province of Ayacucho from Lima, clashes with his superiors after the discovery of a charred and mutilated corpse. Rigidly adhering to bureaucratic procedure, Saldívar demands that an official police report on the crime be filed, despite the active resistance of the police and the local military commander. The prosecutor’s refusal to abort his inquiry threatens the official line that the Shining Path terrorists are a thing of the past. Eventually, he’s reassigned to help monitor elections, only to encounter more corruption. Within the frame of a puzzling whodunit, Roncagliolo crafts an unsparing view of life controlled by a repressive and paranoid government. A mother fixation, social awkwardness and a desire to impress others lend complexity to the protagonist.

March 15, 2009
A latter-day Candide gets a crash course in Peruvian terrorism and counter-terrorism in Roncagliolo's precocious debut, winner of the 2006 Alfaguara Prize.

Though he's spent most of his fledgling career in Lima, Flix Chacaltana Sald"var is back in his birthplace in Ayacucho as an associate district prosecutor when he's called on to take charge of an unspeakable murder. The unidentifiable body, discovered on Ash Wednesday 2000 as the village is just coming off a three-day pre-Lenten bender, has suffered the loss of an arm and has been doused with accelerant and reduced nearly to ashes itself. Armed with an Olivetti typewriter and a manual of procedure, Chacaltana makes the rounds of the local citizens. But no one, of course, knows anything, and Captain Pacheco, of the local police, alternately toys with Chacaltana and impedes his investigation. Only silver-toothed waitress Edith Ayala shows the slightest concern for Chacaltana, and that's by serving him meals he never eats. At length he ignores the obvious evidence that Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, was behind the assassination and instead writes a ludicrously improbable report that endorses the view of Commander Carrižn, of the Army of Peru:"In this country there is no terrorism, by orders from the top." As a reward, he's sent as an election observer to the far-off hamlet of Yawarmayo, a hellish landscape where violent Senderistas battle corrupt officials without quarter, trapping na™ve associate district prosecutors in the middle. As he continues his investigation into the widening circle of violence, Chacaltana can't help but notice that"all the people I talk to die." The case will make a mockery of the detective story's foundational convention of individual guilt, leaving its unlikely hero alone to trace the steps of Christ's passion and death as Holy Week leads inexorably to the bleakest Easter imaginable.

An angry, despairing dispatch, punctuated with illiterate notes from a killer and equally meaningless reports in bureaucratic doublespeak, from a land torn apart by civil war and official denial.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2009
Because it lies between Cuzco, the Inca capital, and Lima, the capital of the Spaniards, and was the ancient home of the Chancas, who successfully fought off even the Incas, the Peruvian city of Ayacucho is said to be doomed to wallow in blood forever. This was true especially during the 1980s and 1990s, when indiscriminate slaughter by the Shining Path brought on the equally savage counterinsurgency of the Fujimori government. Soon after district prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is transferred from Lima to Ayacucho, he grimly undertakes to investigate the case of a charred body discovered in a hayloft during Holy Week of 2000. The unambitious prosecutor gets sucked into a chaotic world far from the ordered words and numbered sentences of his legal codes and breaks down, unable to fathom the illogic of killers fighting killers in a continuous spiral of fire and blood. Roncagliolo, the youngest winner ever of the prestigious Alfaguara Prize for this novel, first published in 2006, offers a riveting and highly relevant tale of the vicious circle of terrorism and retaliation.Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland, MD

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.