Alonso Cueto is one of the most successful established Peruvian writers of his generation. He is also a prolific writer. We only have to take a look to his production to confirm it: 8 novels, 5 books of short stories, a theater script and two books of essays, one about Peruvian issues and the other about books and authors.

His work has also gained international recognition. Today from a dozen of prices and rewards, we are only going to mention The Blue Hour that won the Herralde Novel’s Price in 2005, as well as the distinction of the Editorial House for Popular Literature from the Republic of China for the best novel in Spanish for the period 2004-2005. Apart from being a writer, Alonso Cueto is also an elected member of the Peruvian Academy for Language.

We want to comment two aspects of The Blue Hour that we consider to be real eye-openers for the Dutch audience when talking about Peru. Limiting ourselves in this way we will give the writer more time to explain his own views personally.

The first aspect is: The smoothness in the daily functioning of a profoundly stratified society. The second is the reaction of a nation facing excessive violence and its capacity to transform the pain into a lesson of life.

The Blue Hour is the story of a middle class family established in the Peruvian capital Lima, far away from the rural outburst of the civil war, they could have stayed out of. That precisely is one of the novel’s revelations: It describes a recognizable image of a fragmented Peru, not only geographically, but also torn apart by social conflicts that at a certain point become unavoidable. The horror of the civil war will arrive to the center of this family and change it forever. The novel describes a country challenged by his natural borders, a fact that produces not only distance between its inhabitants but also defines a peculiar course of historical and social conflicts. This image of a totally divided and separated country will be connected when almost everybody get immersed in the intense violence caused by the confrontation between Shining Path and the Peruvian State. It will be a surprising confrontation for the Dutch reader to see how normal and serene the daily functioning of a heavily stratified society can be. It is not even necessary to leave the country to experience the depth of the differences, as Adrián Ormache, the protagonist describes:

“I could have been a rather important lawyer. But this afternoon I was just a strange man knocking at the door of an unknown guy called Paulino Valle. He lived only at a certain distance from my house but at an astral distance from the world I inhabited. I came from the other side of reality, from a dimension were people drive cars and go to sleep in big beds and wake up to contemplate closets full of clothes. (155)

The protagonist’s thoughts, when confronted with different versions of Lima, as well as an unknown Peru, will also guide the reader throughout the painful revelation of a fragmented nation. Only a journey to the unknown places, as well as a personal journey, can relief the pain and construct bridges to unify the pieces until a certain unity is founded. Finally the acceptation of the diversity within the unity will give peace to the protagonist’s anguish. We hope the same effect will be valid for the reader’s journey, because we are already warned by an epigraph at the beginning of the book:

“Maybe one is not only responsible for ones acts, but also for what one sees or reads or listens to.”

The Blue Hour offers to the Dutch reader not just a raw description of the violence that devastated Peru, an image of a stratified society, the drama of national events getting hold of personal lives, it is a story of survival as well. Not only a family struck by circumstances survives, also the individuals are forced to face challenges, to explore dark sides that are solidly hidden, to give catastrophe a place and to even learn something from it.

The novel uses daily events, like the protagonist’s trip to Ayacucho, in rural Peru, to present and summarize cultural concepts, thus displaying the complex Peruvian diversity for the reader. An example is the dialogue between Adrián Ormache and an Ayacuchan girl about the Scissor’s Dance:

“If the gods have lost their bodies, then we have to give them ours. The dancers of the Scissors were the first ones to recreate the world […] When the costume dies, the world dies. The dancer is the god. The dance is the god. We are the god.”(187)

The concept of transfiguration of the Andeans during dancing, the fusion with the gods that inhabit their daily life, the overcoming of the evidence of the pre-hispanic gods’s death are summarized in a nutshell. The reality that emerges is also clear: there is an urgency to take responsibility as protagonists of this new world. The gods have departed leaving the inhabitants alone to fight, to design and conquer their own destiny. Shining Path and the war that broke out in the Peruvian society are historical specific details. The scars of such a devastating event are difficult to erase, but the way in which suffering people transform a dark destiny into a lesson, and even more, into a lesson of life, transforms the experience into a universal concept.

“The dance is a diversion from death. Here they confronted death always. If they were not able to revolt against it in reality, they rebelled through the music, the altarpieces, the dance. […] People here are different from others. […] Nobody here believes that being alive is normal. Here they have always contemplated life with astonishment […] Death is a very good teacher. (182)

The novel has a specific historical setting, the writer even took a real story as a starting point, but conclusions like these give the narrative a universal value that transcends a specific situation.

The novel describes the terrible wounds in the Peruvian psyche but if we look further than fiction we find the return of displaced inhabitants from the warzones, their creative strength and their industrious energy, even their drive in other places they transformed into new homes, that all gives us the impression that indeed they were able to learn from death. Probably when hope is difficult to find even death could be taken as an incredible lesson for courage. And that is a universal idea that can not be ignored.