Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently on a Remote Year trip around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
My first tragedy in Lima was discovering I couldn’t watch Squid Game — despite the fact that the dystopian Korean TV series is available via Netflix Peru! The problem is this: To access Netflix Peru, I need both a Peruvian phone number and credit card, and I have neither.
Theoretically, I could watch Squid Game via my Netflix US account, except I’d put that on pause while in San Diego because my Airbnb there had its own Netflix account. That’s where and how I watched the first episode of the show. Now, Netflix US won’t let me restart my membership to watch the rest of it — because I’m in Peru.
How to resolve this international conflict? I initiated multiple chats with Netflix support people, who asked me such helpful questions as: “Can’t you get another phone?”
To date, my Squid Game tragedy has not been resolved, mainly because I decided it would be easier to read more books instead. That said, Squid Game seems to be popular with Peruvian bibliophiles as well, with one trendsetting Lima bookstore offering free dalgona cookies — and free libros to those who complete the Juego del Calamar challenge.
I may have to invest in a VPN service. In the meantime, here are three books by Peruvian authors to unNetflix and chill by —
Sexographies by Gabriela Wiener (Restless Books, 2018)
Do you remember a web column called “I did it for science”? Published by sex-and-culture website Nerve.com, each installment had a writer try out a sexual fad or subculture — e.g. group masturbation — then write about it in a semi-scientific fashion. Perhaps not the most important form of investigative journalism, but these dispatches made for irreverent, titillating, and addicting reads. Today, Nerve.com is long defunct. Through furious googling I determined Refinery29 may have bought some of its archives, but when I tried to read them, I got only error pages —
I digress. I was reminded of “I did it for science” because Gabriela’s book of riveting personal essays is like that column on steroids. A Peruvian journalist, Gabriela is the type of woman that just likes to try stuff — whether it’s going to visit the polygamous family of a self-anointed sex guru or hanging out in a jail to learn about prison tats or dropping by a swingers club with her husband — then write about it in a charged, naked style, busting myths and ruining fantasies. To wit: “What happens at a swingers club barely resembles the scenes of glamour and lust that people imagine from the outside. To begin with, it’s full of sweaty, potbellied men.” Read it if you love to be provoked and horrified while experiencing a side of contemporary Peru that you likely won’t dare to otherwise.
Get Sexographies from Bookshop
Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins, 2007)
Set in an unnamed South American country that's trying to put itself back together after a long, violent war, this novel has at its center Norma, the host of Lost City Radio, the nation’s most popular radio program. The program has people call in, desperate to find loved ones lost during the war and trying, via Norma’s show, to get reconnected. Occasionally, loved ones actually do get reunited through the show — except unbeknownst to the listeners, the reunions are staged by actors.
Norma too is missing a loved one — a husband who may or may not have been killed for being a secret agent involved in the war. There’s also an orphaned child, a lonely teacher, a man with no hands, and an entire village whose name was replaced by a number. Read it if you like sad, haunting stories of love and loss, spiked with a surreal and stark historic realism.
Get Lost City Radio from Bookshop
Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez (Deep Vellum, 2016)
History was my least favorite subject growing up, partly because I’m horrible at remembering dates and partly because notable moments of human history seem so often to center around senseless violence — so many people starved! Tortured! Killed! To this day, I rarely read history books, but I did want to learn a bit about Peru’s past while I was here, and thus picked up Claudia’s novel, which is based on a historical event.
And OMG, the violence. Set in 1980s Peru, this slim book centers around the actions of Shining Path, a violent communist insurgency group that rose up against the equally violent official military at the time. In the middle are caught innocent villagers whose homes are pillaged and bodies raped, maimed, torn asunder. Basically I learned about like one year of Peruvian history and it was more than I could handle emotionally. Pick it up if you like brutal reads that remind you how little you know about the world — and how lucky you are to live without constant fear of assault and death.
Get Blood of the Dawn from Bookshop
Once a month, I share book recommendations. Shape it by recommending a read!
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love
Autocomplete on crack. Meghan O’Gieblyn writes about GPT-3 — a natural language processing algorithm that can write entire stories, articles, and more in any style you like, “good enough that human readers could rarely guess that it was authored by a machine.”
Your writing minus your words. Clive Thompson made a web tool that strips away the words of your writing — leaving only the punctuation. The results are revelatory —
The Amazonification of the novel. “In the new literary landscape, readers are customers, writers are service providers, and books are expected to offer instant gratification.”