Lima: A Cultural and Literary History (review)

This is the fourth volume on Latin America (the previous three were on Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Havana) in the 'Cities of the Imagination' series, which seeks to provide 'in-depth cultural and historical guides to the great cities of the world'. Those already familiar with Lima might raise an eyebrow at its depiction as a 'great' city, except, of course, in terms of its population of almost 10 million, well over one-third of that of Peru as a whole. Most visitors now approach it from Jorge Chávez airport rather than the dingy port of Callao, where James Higgins landed in the mid-1960s on the first of his many trips to undertake his research on modern Peruvian literature. Either way, the enduring impressions are of chaotic traffic, poor roads, shanty towns, roadside vendors, disagreeable odours and dirt, given that the smarter suburbs of Miraflores, San Isidro, Barranco and beyond, to which the upper and middle classes have retreated from downtown Lima – and which many tourists do not see – are on the opposite side of the city. Those who do not know Lima might be seduced by its oft-misunderstood soubriquet 'City of the Kings', unaware that this defines not so much a splendid imperial past as the simple fact that it was founded on the site of a small native settlement by Francisco Pizarro on 6 January 1535, the feast of the Epiphany or 'Three Kings'. Its name derives from a corruption of 'Rímac', the river that used to flow through it before it virtually dried up, and the city's location in a dismal, arid coastal strip 8 km (5 miles) inland from its port of Callao, was designed to ensure the maintenance of relatively secure maritime communication with Panama (and, eventually, Seville), far from the risky Inca strongholds in the southern Andes.

Unlike the truly 'great' Cusco, Lima and its environs have few pre-Hispanic remains to speak of other than a number of crumbling and much-looted burial mounds. Moreover, most of its colonial buildings date from the late eighteenth century rather than the early colonial period because of the severity of earthquakes, notably that of 1746 and its accompanying tidal wave, which literally washed away Callao and its 5,000 inhabitants and destroyed most of Lima's baroque buildings, themselves constructed after the earlier seismic disaster of 1687. Some splendid mansions erected during the further reconstruction overseen by Manuel de Amat (Viceroy 1761–66) remain to give it a certain grandeur, but others, like the city's old walls, were lost in the 1920s as the old city expanded, with the construction of wide avenues fit for motor traffic and new public spaces such as the rather faded Plaza de San Martín. The old viceregal palace was also lost in the same period, to be replaced by the unremarkable Palacio de Gobierno.

Higgins clearly knows Lima well. This reviewer recalls being guided around what remains of the old city by him in 1970, before it became a virtual no-go area for 'decent' citizens, especially at night, in the 1980s. Lima was, and still is, the magnet that draws in ambitious writers and politicians from the provinces – such as his first literary subject, the Trujillo-raised poet César Vallejo – who seek national recognition. Like his counterparts in Cusco and Arequipa (cities that had headed unsuccessful movements for regional autonomy from Lima in the nineteenth century), Vallejo recognized the truth of the saying 'Peru is Lima, and Lima is the Jirón de la Unión' (the street that links the Plaza de Armas with the Plaza San Martín and their respective elite clubs, the Club de la Unión and the Club Nacional). Although primarily a specialist on twentieth-century literature, Higgins is also familiar with the colonial era. His fluent volume has three substantive chapters, preceded by a brief introduction and a sketch of Lima's prehistory. He devotes some 70 pages of 'City...