From a National Book Award finalist—for her memoir American Chica—and the author of the acclaimed novel Cellophane comes this spare, powerful story of sexual obsession and its consequences.
Carlos Bluhm leads the good life in upper-class Lima: he attends social functions with his elegant wife, goes out drinking with his three best friends, has the occasional, fleeting assignation. . . . Until he meets Maria Fernandez, a dancer at a tango bar in a rough part of town. The beautiful sixteen-year-old intoxicates him. An indigenous dark-skinned Peruvian, she represents everything his safe white world does not, and soon he can’t get her out of his mind. They begin a passionate affair, one that will destroy his marriage and shatter the only reality he’s ever known.
Flash forward twenty years: against all odds, Carlos and Maria have remained together. But when Maria finally presses for a formal commitment, feelings long suppressed erupt in a tense endgame that sends both of them hurtling toward a dangerous resolution that will forever alter their lives.
Brilliantly realized, erotic, unsentimental, Lima Nights is a unique love story and a stunning work of fiction that will reverberate long after its final page.
The plot of this book is adequately summarized above in the publishers weekly review which accompanies its amazon listing. On paper, the plot may sound rather pedantic - older married man with cold, distant wife falls in love with beautiful younger woman, leaves wife, etc. etc.
In fact, this particular story is compelling and the telling of it is done masterfully - I couldn't put the book down. In spare prose, the author weaves a powerful story. The story is also enhanced by its romantic setting in politically unstable Peru in the 1980s, and its associated themes of racial and class conflict.
What makes this book extraordinary, however, is the author's wisdom - particularly the insights her characters impart on the mysterious workings of the human heart. The reader is left with a better understanding of love, and a greater compassion for those who make inexplicable and seemingly poor decisions because of love.
