Latin American Author Shatters Literary Norms

In May 21, 2018 - Following the publication on Amazon of his groundbreaking first book, A Bullet in His Forehead, in 2016, Peruvian American author Manuel Aguirre has decided to kick things up a notch with his explosive new novel, Adieu Chimeras (336 pp), currently for sale on Amazon.com

OXFORD, Mass. (PRWEB) June 06, 2018

In his previous novel, A Bullet in His Forehead (also for sale on amazon.com), Manuel Aguirre, who is himself a former officer of the Peruvian Army, narrated the adventures of Second Lieutenant Gerardo Arrieta, at the height of the Cold War, as he fights against drug running, gun trafficking smugglers from Bolivia while battling his own inner demons with the help of an Aimara shaman named Yatiri. This marks the first time in Latin American literary history that a novel about the Kafkaesque intricacies of military life is written from an insider’s point of view. Every previous novel about the role of the military in Latin America, from Vargas Llosa to Carlos Fuentes, has been written from the perspective of a civilian without any military experience whatsoever. Now, with Adieu Chimeras, Manuel Aguirre—who like Vargas Llosa is also a native of Arequipa—continues the saga (Doubts and Murmurs) of Second Lieutenant Gerardo Arrieta, as this quixotic young officer comes back from his FOB—near Ninantaya, a four-house hamlet—on the border with Bolivia to tackle the rampant corruption and immorality found in his MOB—in the outskirts of the town of Otabala— on the shores of the fabled Lake Titicaca, only to be labeled by his commanding officer as a communist sympathizer, while the country’s Army is fighting a Castrist guerrilla in the jungles of Cuzco. Narrated in the first person by the shaman Yatiri, Adieu Chimeras is a Celinesque portrayal of unbridled sex, debauchery, and administrative graft, juxtaposed with episodes of delirious mysticism and out-of-body phantasmagoric hallucinations, a sort of synesthesia that implies either metempsychosis or multidimensionality.

Adieu Chimeras is an exceptional literary work that pulls together various styles—magical realism, noir, action, black humor—into a seamless whole. In balancing visceral, earthy language with metaphysical and spiritual themes it proves to be a work that is not only perceptive, but intelligent in form and content. The body of the novel is well balanced by bawdy—somewhat funny—interlude chapters detailing a subplot that contrasts nicely with long chapters that generally focus on the protagonist’s existential crisis and the novel’s main thread.

The overall tone and mood of the novel is consistent, and one can say pitch-perfect (even as it changes according to circumstance) and Manuel Aguirre handles very well long, multiple-clause sentences—whether subordinating or additive—conveying the complex ideas that serve as miniature reflections of the structural intricacies on the whole. Like other absurdist works, Adieu Chimeras is both introspective and rebellious in its presentation of the human struggle as being essentially funny and sad at the same time. It’s pacing is optimal. It maintains the suspense through the use of multiple perspectives and a—sometimes unreliable—omniscient shaman-narrator which prove effective in piecing together both the characterizations and plot of the novel.
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For the original version on PRWeb visit: https://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/05/prweb15519121.htm