Lima Nights/A Chicago Tribune Review

My review of Marie Arana's new novel appears in this weekend's addition of the Chicago Tribune. The photograph was taken a few summers ago, in a park in Barcelona.

There was the hint of the sui generis about Marie Arana's 2001 memoir, "American Chica." Born of erupted memories, crackling with kismet, forever scuttling between the past and the now, "Chica" was the story of the author's own Peruvian-American childhood. It questioned collisions and reveled in them. It wrestled with demons and angels, with the intoxicating smell of sugar, with the consequences of a marriage—that of Arana's American mother and her Peruvian father—that yielded, in Arana herself, a "New World fusion." "Chica" was high art, a seraphic amalgamation.

"Lima Nights," Arana's second novel, likewise wrassles with the intersection of people drawn from different worlds. This time, however, the star-crossed lovers are a 15-year-old tango dancer—indigenous, dark-skinned, desperate to escape her shanty life—and a married, middle-aged man named Carlos Bluhm whose heritage suggests upper class but whose daily reality veers toward tawdry. Carlos sells cameras for a living while his mother and wife conspire to pawn family valuables to keep the household afloat. He has gone out to a bar with friends. He spies Maria. They tango—almost. Maria slips a note into Carlos' pocket. The line has already been crossed.

Whereas "Chica" concerned itself with meaning, "Lima Nights" concerns itself with sequence, with the question "What happens next?" What happens when Carlos decides that he must see this young dancer again? What happens when Maria makes it her business to win Carlos' heart (or is it his heart?) so as to gain access to his seemingly upper-class existence? What happens when Carlos' wife learns of the affair, as of course she will, for Carlos, who isn't particularly bright, blazons a trail with the evidence of his dalliance? What happens when Carlos and Maria get stuck with each other, for frankly (and soon enough), few others will have them?

Love isn't at stake here; consequences are. The house where Carlos and Maria live, 20 years after their first flirtation, is falling down around them. Carlos is aging. Maria has cut and dyed her hair, collected some weight around her once graceful limbs. They have gained a talent—each of them—for denying the other what is wanted.

"Lima Nights: makes a quick dart across time—purposefully maintaining its distance from its protagonists, shuttering their thoughts, rendering Carlos and Maria as near mysteries to themselves. About Carlos, for example, Arana writes: "He was keenly aware of the stiffness in his knees, the shrinking girth of his chest, the soft little pot of his belly, but he couldn't quite say why he had lived with the woman upstairs for twenty years, or even how he felt about her, really. The days had slipped by. That was all."

Maria, for her part, does not ever seem to know if she wants Carlos solely for the once-glorious house where they (in separate bedrooms) live, or if something greater stirs within. She craves marriage, that much is certain. She craves the safety such an institution purportedly confers: "All I know is that I need to understand why, after twenty years, the man I live with won't marry me," she tells one of Carlos' friends. "I'm afraid more than ever now that I may lose him, and if I lose him, I lose my roof, my security, everything."

Despite its gorgeous cover and tender opening pages, "Lima Nights" is for the realist, not the romantic. It is for those who are willing to stare unblinking into the dark tunnel of irreversible choices.