IF YOU TURN TO LOOK BACK

In this memoir, a trip to Chile stirs up memories of a former Peace Corps volunteer’s stay a quarter-century before.

Hazuka was just 21 when he left his Connecticut home for South America in 1978. While volunteering for the Peace Corps, he spent the bulk of his two-and-a-half-year stint in Arica, Chile. Not until 2003 did he return to Arica, along with his wife, Christine, to visit his Chilean friend Hugo Buitano and his family. Many things had changed, from landmarks he didn’t recognize to Hugo’s toddler, who had grown into a 26-year-old law student. But he saw familiar sights, too, like the room in which he’d long resided while in Arica. Alternating between his years as a PCV and his two-week vacation in 2003, the author evocatively recounts what it was like to be an American in Chile. 1978 was only a few years after the CIA had helped Chile’s then-dictator Augusto Pinochet rise to power; some locals suspected the PCVs were CIA agents. At the same time, the author experienced the “Gringo Advantage,” since his monthly Peace Corps pay was better than what many Chileans brought in. This book teems with snippets of Chile’s history, such as the detention and torture center that, by 2003, had become a hotel. These tidbits perfectly suit Hazuka’s exploration of memory and the concept of “concatenation”—the idea that luck and chance shape lives through a “chain of human connection.” He rhapsodizes over photos and documents that help jog his recollections, so it’s hardly surprising that his journal excerpts appear throughout. This memoir also includes a small selection of fiction pieces, with such highlights as “Dead Letter” (in which a character ponders reading her late lover’s final correspondence) and “Altiplano” (a fictional version of a real-life experience the author details earlier in the book).

A reminiscence jam-packed with insights and genuine curiosity.