The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto

Abstract

56 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews finds comfort in the company of her friends as they steal guavas and try to avoid the harsh world of adults or as a teenager who, after years living in the United States, has become jaded and cynical, Darling speaks to us with a voice that is direct, powerful , and believable. On the return of her father, ravaged by HIV/AIDS after living in South Africa, Darling says: “Father comes home after many years of forgetting us, of not sending us money, of not loving us, not visiting us, not anything us, and parks in the shack, unable to move, unable to talk properly, unable to anything, vomiting and vomiting.” Bulawayo humanizes personal hardship by avoiding platitudes and letting Darling speak her own truths. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends at times witness violent events. Bulawayo relates such moments and their aftermath in terse and revealing language. Darling describes the games she and her ten-year-old friends play as they run through the city: “Bastard is at the front . . . then myself and Godknows, Stina, Sbho, and finally Chipo, who used to outrun everybody in all of Paradise but not anymore because somebody made her pregnant.” In the United States, Darling is caught between nostalgia and estrangement from the world she has left. About to finish high school, Darling Skypes her mother’s house, only to be confronted by a now-assertive Chipo, who challenges Darling’s authority to speak about Zimbabwe. “What are you doing not in your country right now? Why did you run off to America? Tell me, do you abandon your house because it’s burning or do you find water to put out the fire?” Equally unhappy to be asked about “back there” by Americans who know little about Zimbabwe, Darling develops a cutting perspective on the foibles of Americans. Cleaning the house of a wealthy family, she reads the daughter’s diary and dismisses the “expensive nonsense [written] in her expensive diary.” The father “has traveled all over Africa but all he can even tell you about are the animals and parks he has seen.” With access to more things, food, and personal liberty than she would have experienced in Zimbabwe , Darling remains unsettled. “In America, roads are like the devil’s hands, like God’s love, reaching all over, just the sad thing is, they won’t really take me home.” As Darling has come to realize, there may no longer be such a thing as home to return to. Jim Hannan Le Moyne College Alonso Cueto. The Blue Hour. Frank Wynne, tr. London. Heinemann. 2012. isbn 9780434019410 The Spanish edition of Alonso Cueto ’s The Blue Hour was awarded the coveted Premio Herralde de Novela when it was first published in Barcelona in 2005. It tells the story of Adrián Ormache, a well-educated and successful lawyer who, in the beginning, lives a comfortable upperclass life in Lima with his loving wife, Claudia, and their two daughters; but his life suddenly changes when his mother dies and he learns disturbing facts about his deceased father. Even though his mother divorced his father when Adrián was a young boy, he always considered him a war hero. While stationed in a small town in the Andes of southern Peru, Colonel Ormache conducted numerous military operations, which included the torture, rape, and murder of many civilians suspected of terrorism during the war against the Shining Path guerrilla organization in the 1980s and ’90s in Peru. One of his prisoners , Miriam, was a young local girl whom the colonel had kidnapped and held hostage at his post. After playing along as his lover for a period of time, Miriam finally managed to escape during the “blue hour,” meaning shortly before dawn. Cueto’s riveting, fast-paced novel, impeccably translated by Frank Wynne, starts out as a political thriller and turns into a well-crafted and gripping psychological drama of a son attempting to come to terms with the painful ghosts of a father he never really knew. Ron Butlin The Magicians of Edinburgh Polygon This collection of poems from Edinburgh’s poet laureate gives a fresh face to an old...