The decision was structural, and everything else came afterward. The tour, which was only briefly mentioned in that first draft, gave me narrative momentum. I went back to Diciembre, back to The Idiot President, and re-imagined the novel. The first half of 2011 was really difficult, and when I began to rewrite, I felt I needed an organizing event to structure the narrative. I got utterly lost in that book, and eventually found I had no choice but to throw it out and start over. The more I worked on the novel, the more helpless I felt watching it wander off into dire and uninteresting narrative territory, and just hang out there, dawdling, waiting to be put out of its misery.
#THE BOOK OF DANIEL (NOVEL) FULL#
But my first full draft, completed in late 2010, was a mess. Nelson has been kicking around in my head for many, many years, as has Diciembre, and I knew I wanted to have a character who was in the theater. I’ve adapted it here (with his permission, of course) but it wasn’t originally such a central part of the book. What inspired you to place the play at the center of a novel such that it is the connective tissue for all of your characters and their particular narratives?ĭANIEL ALARCÓN: The play in the novel is based on a real play called El Mandatario Idiota, by the Peruvian playwright Walter Ventosilla. Nelson successfully tries out for a key role that leads him on a tragic trajectory.
Flash forward 15 years and Henry is out of prison and the aging members of Diciembre decide to take the play on tour again.
He becomes obsessed with a radical theatre company known as Diciembre that puts on a politically incendiary play titled The Idiot President resulting in the 1986 arrest of Henry Nuñez, the lead actor and playwright. DANIEL OLIVAS and DANIEL ALARCÓN talk about his new novel.ĭANIEL OLIVAS: In your new novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, you introduce us to Nelson, a “moody, thoughtful” boy growing up in a suburb of the capital of a war-torn, unnamed Latin American country.