The World We Saw Burning

Matas Roeder, a young man with an Italian father, German mother, and a sense of stagnation he is desperate to escape from, hops a boat from Peru to New York with vague plans but a firm intention to never go home again. This familiar story of migrationthe odd jobs, the romances, the Bowery barsgoes sideways when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and he joins the US Air Force as part of a bombing crew. Matas is now Matthew, in the belly of a B-17, remade by the vertigo and rawness of aerial warfare. But the past comes roaring back when he trains his sights on his beloved grandfathers hometown of Hamburg. Matass reckoning unfolds in the interstices of other stories, swapped by two more Peruvians a journalist and a cabdriver stuck in a present-day Madrid traffic jam, whose lives in Lima are now as distant as World War II was to their homeland. The World We Saw Burning is both a striking account of war and a reflection on identity and uprootedness in a time when everything seems on the verge of exploding or disappearing forever.