When Gerardo Arrieta graduated from a military academy, he came out believing in the ideals of honor, duty, loyalty, God, and country. But all of that began to change when Second Lieutenant Arrieta was confronted with the harsh reality of military life in the Andean Plateau. After completing his first assignment in FOB Ninantaya where he spent six months—with only a bare minimum of food and supplies—defending the border with Bolivia against drug trafficking/gun running smugglers whose leader is a thug who goes by the name of Hilario, whom Arrieta’s mentor, the local medicine man, Yatiri, seduces Gerardo into believing that the man is Satan in the flesh hell bent on collecting his soul. Six months later, Second Lieutenant Arrieta comes back to his main operating base of Otabala, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, only to find that there’s an active conspiracy on the part of his superiors to embezzle funds, and that some of his fellow junior officers want to include him in an intramural ‘adultery ring’. That’s when Gerardo Arrieta decides that it’s time for him to take a stand defending what he believes to be right—even if it could cost him his life— and fulfill a morally ambiguous promise he made to the old shaman. In writing Adieu Chimeras, Manuel Aguirre follows the example of such literary bad boys as Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, in that he takes no prisoners. Also, this novel’s dark humor which helps to tone down the plot’s violence, is evocative of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
