Blood of the Dawn

In this fiery and political debut, Jiménez explores the rise of the communist Shining Path in 1980s Peru through the experience of three women caught up in it. Marcela is a former social worker who abandons her “little bourgeois life” in order to “transform into a revolutionary weapon.” Rechristened “Comrade Marta,” she leads a mountain insurrection not far from where the peasant Modesta imagines herself the “mistress of the clouds” to escape her husband’s complaints. A journalist named Melanie also heads from the city to the country, wondering, “What on earth are those guerrillas after?” Their attempt “to turn the world upside down” is little more than an excuse to kill; as Marta crows, “The revolution demands its share of blood.” Modesta is taken hostage while her husband is traveling, and Melanie and Marta soon share in her anguish. In turn, the “anticommunist journalist,” the “terrorist,” and the “flea-ridden Indian” are raped, each reduced to “a lump on the floor” by her various tormentors. But these are more archetypes than characters, and the occasional burst of ungrammatical prose (“mountains huge like the hills we burst”) that Jiménez uses to energize her novel are not enough to save it from seeming overly schematic. “We made no mistakes,” Marta reflects, her faith in the revolution hardly shaken despite its failure. “Violence is the midwife of history.” (Nov.)