Bad Vibes

Already popular in his native Chile, Fuguet will be a welcome new voice to American readers. Bad Vibes, his first novel (he's published two others in Chile), artfully captures a tense moment in a country's political history, the lifestyle of a society and the personal development of its jaded young narrator, Matias Vicuna. Set in Santiago, in 1980, it's an evocative tale of adolescent alienation and the psychic price of dictatorship. When Matias visits Rio on a school trip, he gets a suntan, falls in love, discovers cocaine and worsens his already dismally blase view of his real life back in Chile. Once he returns to Santiago, his feelings of isolation only grow. He's vexed by the dysfunctional routines of his prominent family, bored with the blur of drugs, alcohol and sullen promiscuity he shares with his privileged friends and unsettled by the waxing political tension under Pinochet's government. Along with the memories of Brazil, ideas and images from American pop culture-the disco age-so influential among Matias's peers heighten his sense that he is missing out on an exciting, stimulating life outside his troubled country. For Matias, Fuguet crafts a memorable narrative voice-candid, prone to overheated insight and exhibiting mastery of telling detail-that makes his protagonist a spiritual cousin of Holden Caulfield. North American readers will enjoy Fuguet's unique perspective on the cultural legacy of the U.S.-made the more immediate in Cordero's seamless translation. (Apr.)