![]() He learns some of Rogelio’s past, he creates a character, and he sees it, for awhile at least, as a game. The chance to play Rogelio is thrust upon Nelson - he doesn’t choose it - but once immersed in it, you’re right, he does seem to enjoy aspects of the challenge before him. Everyone in the novel is performing versions of themselves. They’re actors, but they’re not the only ones. Henry is pretending, Patalarga and Nelson, too. What, if anything, does this say about Nelson’s connection to reality and our own attempts at role playing in our everyday lives?ĭA: Of course that’s one of the themes of the novel - this playacting we all do. Though forced to do this by Rogelio’s powerful (and somewhat violent) brother for the benefit of their senile mother, Nelson seems to relish the chance to flex his actor’s muscles and play a role for an audience of one who does not know it is all pretense. I can assure you that it didn’t feel that way at the time.ĭO: In a compelling and quite moving section of the novel, Nelson is called upon to impersonate Rogelio, a man who died years before and who had been Henry’s cellmate at the notorious prison known as Collectors. Like so many things that happen in the writing of a novel, this was an accident that now feels inevitable and entirely logical. The text of the play gave me plenty to riff off of. It succeeded - as a narrative gambit, I mean - in so far as it allowed me to move Nelson out of his element (the city was absolutely stultifying the first draft), and force Henry to crash into his past. The decision was structural, and everything else came afterward. The tour, which was only briefly mentioned in that first draft, gave me narrative momentum. I went back to Diciembre, back to The Idiot President, and re-imagined the novel. The first half of 2011 was really difficult, and when I began to rewrite, I felt I needed an organizing event to structure the narrative. I got utterly lost in that book, and eventually found I had no choice but to throw it out and start over. The more I worked on the novel, the more helpless I felt watching it wander off into dire and uninteresting narrative territory, and just hang out there, dawdling, waiting to be put out of its misery. ![]() But my first full draft, completed in late 2010, was a mess. Nelson has been kicking around in my head for many, many years, as has Diciembre, and I knew I wanted to have a character who was in the theater. I’ve adapted it here (with his permission, of course) but it wasn’t originally such a central part of the book. What inspired you to place the play at the center of a novel such that it is the connective tissue for all of your characters and their particular narratives?ĭANIEL ALARCÓN: The play in the novel is based on a real play called El Mandatario Idiota, by the Peruvian playwright Walter Ventosilla. Nelson successfully tries out for a key role that leads him on a tragic trajectory. Flash forward 15 years and Henry is out of prison and the aging members of Diciembre decide to take the play on tour again. He becomes obsessed with a radical theatre company known as Diciembre that puts on a politically incendiary play titled The Idiot President resulting in the 1986 arrest of Henry Nuñez, the lead actor and playwright. DANIEL OLIVAS and DANIEL ALARCÓN talk about his new novel.ĭANIEL OLIVAS: In your new novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, you introduce us to Nelson, a “moody, thoughtful” boy growing up in a suburb of the capital of a war-torn, unnamed Latin American country.
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