Three strands in At Night We Walk in Circles

Daniel Alarcon's At Night We Walk in Circles - the title, as we learn about half-way in, is the playwright Henry's account of his time, about a half-year, in a high-security prison, known as the Collectors, where he was brought after his bogus arrest as a terrorist, based on his provocative play with the great title The Idiot President (great title!) - the inmates would walk in circles and tell one another stories and figure things out (actually, hard to believe they would be allowed that much freedom). This fine novel has two maybe three parallel strands: one follows a young actor, Nelson, who seems to be the lead character, living in this unnamed South American capital, possibly Lima, Peru?, or maybe Santiago - joins the theater troupe, heads off for a lengthy tour of the provinces with this radical play, some 15 years after Henry's imprisonment, during which the country has changed, the autocratic dictatorship toppled - it's his first time out of the capital and he's amazed by everything, the village life, the dangerous roads, the amazing locales where they perform - an open field under stars, the floor of a slaughterhouse. (The audience interacts in strange ways - some have never seen live theater - shouting out questions - which in one performance led Henry, playing ththe President, to hold an impromptu news conference.) During this tour of the provinces, N. calls home only once, Henry had ordered the troupe (just 3 of them) not to do so, to keep the focus on the play and the environment - and during this call he learns his girlfriend is pregnant by another guy. 2nd major plot strand is Henry, who reflects on his imprisonment, how it terrified and changed him, most markedly by his prison homosexual romance with another inmate, Rogerio - who later died in a prison riot and fire. Part of the purpose of the tour for Henry is to go to R's village - which they do at last, and he meets R's mother and others who knew R- and they believe R is living safely in the U.S. This is very mysterious - are they just innocent, or unwilling to face the fact of R's death? Or is Henry misinformed or delusional in some way? The 3rd strand, not too developed over first half of novel, is the narrator who is telling this story as a record of his investigation - he has interviewed all of the principals, except Nelson, to build this report - which raises a question about Nelson, who appears to not have survived this tour (we don't know why yet) and about the narrator - who is he/she and why the interest in these events? This narration as investigation is another way in which Alarcon's novel is much like contemporary Latin American fiction (though Alarcon is an American writer working in English) - Bolano did these investigations famously in many of his works; another novel I read recently, The Sound of Things Falling, was also an investigation, or a sort - exploring the border between fiction and journalism.