How might one write about history, in a manner to best convey how an individual feels going about one’s life, while a very specific series of so-called historical events transpires? I’ve read and enjoyed lots of non-fiction histories; an event happens to, around, or is described by the author, then another. I’ve also read lots of fictional historical novels, which follow a similar plan, but use characters and even events created by the author. The order of events and characters is easily sussed in both fiction and non-fiction. Reading the finished work provides a pleasing clarity. Story is sorted from noise. Even if disorder prevails, so does understanding, in theory. But in a world of constant, whirling chaos, are clarity, understanding and pleasure appropriate, applicable goals?
Avik Jain Chatlani is a historian. His novel, This Country Is No Longer Yours, is set in Peru, during the time of The Shining Path’s “revolutionary” war and the rule of Alberto Fujimori. But in order to convey the impression of those places and that time, Chatlani eschews the narrative norms of both historical fact and fiction. With the lightest of hands, Chatlani offers a straightforward, no special-effects vision of life amidst a swirl of chaos, violence, and unchecked human excess. It feels like a series of vivid nightmares and daydreams, hope, self-destruction and despair jumbled together almost without reason.
It feels like life, here and now.
We start with a student, sent by his professor to see “The end of the world.” If that feels familiar, it should. As Chatlani moves from story to story, a powerful picture of a nation descending slowly and often, it seems, deliberately, into hell emerges. Evacuated cities, now home to macaws released by the fleeing citizens who once kept them as pets. The fantasy of a socialist republic imposed by violent murderers with guns. Educated men with reasonable ideas rendered senseless by poverty and ineptitude. A lone soldier in love, contemplating the unthinkable. Chatlani’s individual stories blend and blur, slowly turning gritty reality into all-too-surreal horror. History is a nightmare you wake up to, not from.
This Country Is No Longer Yours is written with great precision, as if by a surgeon who must perform a hail-Mary operation with no anesthetic. The patient may survive, but won’t thank you. It’s powerful and compelling in its willingness to use the toolkit of experimental fiction without dandying up the novel. Here’s an entirely original take on history, offering realistic events, realistically described, but set up like a series of unhappy dreams. This is history as it happens and as it feels. This is a country in South America, early in the 21st century. If This Country Is No Longer Yours sounds like a description of where you live, right now – it is.
Avik Jain Chatlani does not look or act or speak like a historian. He apparently uses a robust education to replay VHS tapes of his youth as prose, and we’re the better for it. You can hear our conversation here, or listen below. Keep alert to your surroundings. It is every bit as dangerous as you imagine.
Narrative Species 