Mario Vargas LlosaTiempos recios

Spirits hum through the book, with many of the poems acting as testament to singular lives taken by war, famine, greed, disaster. The pages are filled with imaginative language, but as one delves deeper into each poem, it becomes clear that the most striking lines are often just so because they exist simultaneously as impossible and true—not imagined at all but actualities that take on layered meaning in the context of the broader work and Forché’s activism: “After the earthquake, people moved into the family tombs. / Many graves now have light and running water.” These lines invoke the dogged determination to live amid immeasurable horrors and our uncanny ability to deny the inevitable, no matter how closely it is built around us. There is in these poems a sense of responsibility: to the fullness of lives unnecessarily unbound; to poetry and its insistence on meaning; to attention and action, no matter the cost. And yet the work is open. It is filled with entry points, porous, allowing room for readers to make their way in, to touch the cold gray walls and leave with a newfound urgency for one another; for what they cannot see or hear, except in that shared “stone of the mind within us / carried from one silence to another.” (Editorial note: Forché’s remarkable interview with Chard deNiord appeared in the January 2017 issue of WLT.) Bailey Hoffner University of Oklahoma Mario Vargas Llosa Tiempos recios Barcelona. Alfaguara. 2019. 352 pages. IN TIEMPOS RECIOS, Mario Vargas Llosa returns to a central theme in his fiction: political power and Latin American dictatorships . In 1954 Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown in a coup d’état and replaced by dictator Carlos Castillo Armas. During his three years in office, Arbenz, a democratically elected president, by what Bouziane calls “the cacophony of memory,” namely the dizzying flow of scattered images and emotions traveling from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Beyond the ambivalent poetics of the desert, Dune Song develops a deep reflection on identity and difference in troubled times. Resisting the narrative of civilizational hostility, the novel is replete with signs of multicultural dialogue and transnational exchange. When recollecting her wanderings in the streets of New York, Jeehan observes that the Angel Gabriel on the apex of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine is the same archangel revered by Muslims for having revealed the Qur’an to the Prophet. In Morocco, the narrative purposely mentions a taxi driver and a young street seller wearing, respectively, “a Philadelphia Eagles jacket” and “a New York Yankees baseball cap.” In fact, Bouziane’s novel foregrounds a semiology of solidarity and dialogue embedded in the process of writing between spaces and cultures. But to what extent can dialogue emerge from the throes of fear and confusion? As an Arab American in post-9/11 New York, Jeehan faces all sorts of harassment and discrimination and struggles to respond to the suspicious and often harmful questions of her colleagues. In this fraught atmosphere, however, the novel suggests that suspicion is fueled less by gratuitous hatred than by a lack of knowledge of and engagement with the other. But who, then, is Jeehan Nathaar? A wounded soul lost in the emptiness of the desert or a wanderer of modern times fleeing horror and seeking a lost sense of being and belonging? To what extent does Dune Song help us think through issues of displacement, exploitation, and violence? The novel’s oblique—and perhaps insufficiently developed—approach to the experience of African migrants crossing the desert and being subject to all sorts of trafficking might leave the reader unsatisfied . Yet Bouziane, in writing about absence, uprooting, and alterity in the times of globalized violence, implicitly invites us to rethink immigration issues and policies beyond national borders and geographic boundaries. Dune Song speaks of the difficulty of healing broken bodies and minds, of thinking “the unthinkable,” of finding a way through “the topography of bewildered sorrow,” of seeking peace and unity instead of fueling fear and hatred. In the pathless Sahara, traces and scars are often erased by sandstorms. Similarly, individual dreams and collective wounds might vanish with the past, but

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