New Writing from Peru

Words Without Borders has a very interesting interview with Peruvian writer Jorge Eduardo Benavides. At one point they talk about his trilogy, based on political upheaval in the 20th centiry in Peru. It soulds like a great three novels:

JB: You’ve written, while in Spain, what might be considered a trilogy about the Peru of the recent past. Los años inútiles is about the end of the 1980s; El año que rompí contigo turns on the transition of power from Alan García to Alberto Fujimori. And Un millón de soles tells the story of the coup attempt launched by Juan Velasco in 1968. How did the idea for this trilogy arise?

JEB: The idea of the trilogy did not come to me immediately, but rather emerged out of some research that came after writing the first novel, Los años inútiles. Since it was a social and political sort of inquiry that motivated me to write the novel, this interest expanded and occupied much of my thinking; this is how the second novel emerged, which at heart is concerned with the same historical period (the years of the first Alan García government), only it is told from a different perspective and puts its emphasis on the last stage of that period, which is to say, the complete disintegration of García’s APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) regime and the arrival of Fujimori in power. But these two novels led me to investigate—always from a literary point of view—the origin of this crack in Peruvian society, which, from a novelistic standpoint, was fascinating. How had these things occurred during those terrible years of our society? It wasn’t only a failure of governing and a problem of disorder, but it also suggested that something was truly rotten in our country. Then I wanted to visit, so to say, the period prior to the resumption of democracy in 1980—that is, the eleven years of military dictatorship we had since 1968. The characters of the two novels I had just finished writing had a past: as politicians, journalists, businessmen, influence peddlers, military men. This novel—which I would call Un millón de soles—presented something like the genesis of what happened in Los años inútiles. This is a novel that seeks to understand how the singular and centralized power of a dictatorship functioned from its innermost reaches. And it interested me to organize the novel in such a way that it formed part of what I had discovered in the context of the trilogy: three novels linked by the same need to take up, and novelize, an extended period of our recent history.

The also talk about Benavides' story "The Reckoning," which you can read in Words Without Borders. Just try reading Benavides'description thereof without wanting to read the story itself:

“The Reckoning” is perhaps one of the first stories in which I seek to meld the fantastical with the political. The idea is simple, and it begins with the allegory of a fearful presence that kills or devours those who dare to confront it . . . The allegory of totalitarianism, of the doctrinaire rigidity that destroys the best part of human life and that wipes out especially the intellectuals. Naturally, put that way, the story has more of a political or even philosophical bent, and what I wanted was a story based on that period in which Peru was trapped by the fundamentalist terror of the Shining Path. And the question was: what would happen if this were to come to pass? If we had a government of illuminated Ayatollahs like the Shining Path purported to be . . . what would happen to intellectual life? For that reason, the story is situated temporally in the moments prior to the arrival of that dystopian universe willed into being by the orders of the Shining Path, when a few professors realize that that “presence” that circles them like a tiger or a fierce beast is capable of killing them.