Roncagliolo is a young Peruvian writer I never read before and decided to check out to keep up with developments in Latin American literature. La noche de los alfileres is a male Bildungsroman and like all novels in this exhausted genre it follows the same tired pattern we have all encountered in countless other male Bildungsromane.
The novel’s saving grace resides in its somewhat heavy-handed yet valuable exploration of the crisis that Latin American masculinity is undergoing. This is a novel about damaged boys and their damaged fathers and the violent, hopeless world that arises when men can’t connect with women and organize reality around their homosocial / homoerotic networks.
The novel can work great for an undergraduate course if you teach on the coasts and not in the Bible Belt. There is a lot of profanity and a lot of discussion of teenage boys’ desperate need to have sex. But it reads very easily, there are tons of history occurring in the background, and lots of theory can be easily introduced.
Nice novel, nice young writer, and a nice reminder that those of us who never had the experience of being teenage boys are extremely fortunate.
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