Troupers - Very impressed with At Night We Walk in Circles

Really impressed by everything about Daniel Alarcon's At Night We walk in Circles, from the very vivid descriptions, the beautiful but not self-conscious writing, the intriguing plot, the many powerful scenes, and the sharply drawn characters. At this point in the novel, about half-way through, the acting troupe The Deciemberists (sp?) have done their final performance of the weird three-man play The Idiot President, in the small town of T-- where prison cellmate and lover of the head of the troupe, Henry, had been raised. As noted yesterday, Henry stumbles into a serious problem when he brings news of Rogelio's death to his elderly mother - the mother thinks he's alive in the U.S. (and I wondered if that were possible), but we soon learn that the family had been hiding the death from her for many years. When the drug-dealer thug brother learns that Henry had almost upset this whole scheme, he turns up at the performance and, afterwards, beats the crap out of Henry. Henry is frightened of course, but also remorseful - he by no means meant to upset the family. He agrees to go to the mother and apologize; in one of the many surprising scenes, the mother things the young member of the troupe, the main character, Nelson, is her son, and Nelson agrees to stay there for a week or so and "play" that "role" - as the other two troupers board an old bus and head back to the capital. This may seem like an ambling, meandering plot - as you might also think from the title - but it's actually quite tightly drawn and intense - helped by the narrative structure, in which the seldom-appearing first-person narrator is investigating something about the troupe and these events - presumably, the ultimate fate of Nelson, his death or maybe his disappearance. Some of the scenes in the small Andean villages are almost hypnotic, and the contrast with some of the other more crowded and anxious scenes - Henry's account of his life in prison, Nelson's recollection of the death of his father - makes the relief between the plot elements even sharper, more finely contrasted.