Lost City Radio.

• Author: Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod
• Position: Book review

Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Daniel Alarcon is only 30 years old, but he already shows signs of being a prolific writer. He published a collection of short stories and numerous articles before the arrival of Lost City Radio, and his novel is already bringing comparisons to the great luminaries of Latin America. Born in Peru, he was just three when his parents brought him to Birmingham, Alabama.

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Lost City Radio, however, could take place in any country. Alarcon has stated that his impression of present-day society is that it has "no concern for human life." That prevailing theme, along with characters portrayed with great sensitivity, make his novel a masterpiece.

After high school, Alarcon attended college in New York, pursuing a bachelor's degree in anthropology and a teaching credential. After teaching Latino fifth graders in the South Bronx for two years, he traveled to Lima, where he applied the same creative classroom approach as he did with the kids in the Bronx, leading them to photography. Alarcon had discovered that when he allowed students to create a collage of photographs representing their countries and families, they opened up and entered the learning process. In a large barrio on the outskirts of Lima, originally a squatters' camp, Alarcon helped youngsters create documentaries about their lives, which he self-published with an organization called Defensores de la Paz.

"To see communication begin between those isolated communities is powerful," Alarcon said in a recent interview.

Like Viramontes's novel, Lost City Radio preserves a people who have been discounted and moved to the fringes by urban complexities. As with numerous "little villages in the Andes, my mother's town no longer exists," he said, adding that it is an example of many more such places, now erased in memory by federal army sweeps through the jungles. His mother's village could only be accessed after eight hours of travel by milk truck from Cajamarca, but even so, the army made sure to find it.

In the novel, the name of the radio show, "Lost City," is apt in more ways than one. Entire villages have disappeared; the government has assigned them numbers and destroyed old maps. Only a few still remember the original names. As depicted in Lost City Radio, life in a jungle village--despite the lack of modern conveniences, including electricity--was multi-faceted and serene. However, once there were few...