Peruvian author Raúl Tola has published a new novel, El peso del aire, through Alfaguara. The 446-page book centers on the Fujimori dictatorship and the sacrifices made by those who opposed it, and it marks what reviewer José Carlos Yrigoyen calls the probable close of a trilogy of historical novels.
Tola, born in Lima in 1975, built his early reputation on two novels that probed the secrets of a middle class unable to confront itself: Noche de cuervos (1999) and Heridas privadas (2002). He then shifted toward large-scale historical fiction with Flores amarillas (2013), set inside the corrupt machinery of the Odría regime, and La noche sin ventanas (2017), which took the relationship between Peru and the Axis powers during the Second World War as its subject.
El peso del aire follows Esteban Gamio, a young university student who moves into journalism and eventually becomes a presenter at Canal N, a cable outlet that positioned itself as an independent, critical voice within a media landscape dominated by the authoritarian regime. From that starting point, which Yrigoyen describes as carrying evident autobiographical elements, the novel fans out into subplots that form what he calls a complex and effective mechanism in which questions of power and the everyday life it corrupts are intertwined.
Yrigoyen credits Tola with building an ambitious, well-written novel that reflects nearly three decades of patient craft. He describes Tola as a serious narrator with a command of the chaotic urban landscape and the particular speech and rhythms of Lima, and says the book confirms a growing narrative elegance that was already visible in La noche sin ventanas.
The review's central reservation is what Yrigoyen characterizes as an almost obsessive debt to Mario Vargas Llosa. He argues that Tola's three historical novels borrow the unmistakable language, orality, and thematic concerns of the older writer, and that both Flores amarillas and El peso del aire read as attempts to recreate Vargas Llosa's Conversación en La Catedral, with the newer book at moments approaching the mimetic. That does not make it a bad novel, Yrigoyen concludes, calling it perhaps the best a derivative novel can be.
He does find it notable that Tola clings with such conviction to a realism with sixty years behind it at a moment when Peruvian literature is pursuing less explored directions. Tola seems, the reviewer writes, to embrace his position as an apprentice of a master without embarrassment and even with enthusiasm, which he allows is a legitimate place to occupy in literature.
El peso del aire is published by Alfaguara (2025, 446 pages).
