Lima Nights

by Marie Arana

Book Overview

From a National Book Award finalist-for her memoirAmerican Chica-and the author of the acclaimed novelCellophanecomes this spare, powerful story of sexual obsession and its consequences. Carlos Bluhm... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385342594
• ISBN13: 9780385342599
• Release Date: July 2010
• Publisher: Dial Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Fear of intimacy

LIMA NIGHTS (2009) by Marie Arana is a story about an unlikely and unlucky relationship between a forty-something German Peruvian man (white) and a Native (brown) sixteen year-old girl, who he first sees in a dance club in 1986. The story and the relationship span twenty years, to 2006. What we are given by the author is a passionate beginning and an ill-fated end. Nothing of the twenty years the couple spends together is told, and that works because it's essentially a story about sexual attraction, friendship, cultural bias, race, wealth and poverty, that persist timelessly throughout the lifespan. But mostly it's a story about communication, and how the failure to talk honestly can destroy the human bond. It's a story about how fear, anger, and jealousy can wiggle into a relationship when couples cannot express their feelings and desires openly. It's a story about how biased "friends" and stereotypes can undermine a relationship. It's a story about how psychiatry and shamanism--disparate ways of trying to understand and influence what is going on between couples--can both do harm without honest disclosure. It's a story about fear of intimacy. What I took away from this well told tale was a sense of sadness--that attraction is not enough, obligation is not enough, even money is not enough. It was intriguing, honest, unsentimental, and well written. It is a refreshing change from a lot of what is being published and touted today (Happy ending Chick-lit, Boy-lit, Men's fiction, & Women's fiction). There are no heroes, no villains, no anti-heroes, or anti-villains, just an honest, reality based story of two people--their beginning and their end. Five stars.

could not stop reading

I could not stop reading this book after a long day since 8 p.m. until 2 a.m. I just had to find out the end! though not very smooth at times in its transitions the book is something so universal: two people, passion, consequences, life after, greed for more in life, prejudice. recommend.

"He was the one who would rescue her from misfortune."

This is quite a brilliant little novel, a middle-aged man obsessed with the sultry beauty, dark skin and flashing eyes of a dancer he meets in a Lima nightclub in the 1980s. Of German Lineage, Carlos Bluhm enjoys a comfortable life; a camera salesman, he has long-time friends, a wife and two sons, an inherited home in an exclusive part of the city, quiet leafy streets where the stench of poverty doesn't intrude. The girl, fifteen-year-old Juana Maria Fernandez, knows the ravages of poverty intimately, her mother and brothers living in near-squalor, Maria desperate to avoid her mother's fate. When his imagination settles on the lithe beauty of the dancer, Carlos becomes of two minds, his normal world colliding with the secret one, where he compulsively visualizes Maria, desires only the stolen minutes with her, which soon are not enough. Thinking himself clever, Carlos is careless, his duplicity eventually exposing a man in thrall to his passions, willing to deny everything to have what he wants. Like a man possessed, Bluhm will not- or cannot- entertain reason, his only desire to placate and shelter this young woman, to escape reality with her. For her part, Maria is near feral in her instincts. Barely educated, she knows only that security may be delivered by this man, social conventions and practicalities aside. Arana exposes the intimate longings of her two protagonists, caught up in a dynamic driven by Bluhm's need and Maria's instinct for self-preservation. Whatever he has imagined for his life, Maria becomes central, necessary, nothing as significant. While the government struggles with a constant threat from home-grown terrorism, Carlos blows up his own life without outside agitation, the collateral damage of loved ones barely registering. This attraction between Carlos and Maria endures for twenty years, the author weaving in subtle threads of waning passion, nascent jealousy and the odd behaviors of enchantment grown stale. Even then Carlos and Maria are inextricably linked, clinging to a past that no longer exists. Artful and exotic, if occasionally baffling, Lima Nights lingers long after this fool's paradise goes dark. Luan Gaines/ 2009.