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.
About the Author: Manuel Aguirre (Arequipa, 1940), is a retired officer of the Peruvian Army since 1972. Between the years 1971 and 1976, he traveled to, and lived in, France, Hungary, and Spain. In 1978, he earned a master's degree in business administration at ESAN, in Lima, Peru. While in that city he worked in banks and insurance companies until 1987. In August of that year, he immigrated to the U.S., where he lived in California until May 2013. He currently resides in Oxford, MS with his wife and youngest son. In 1972, he published a book of poems titled Razón de silencio (Author's Edition). In 2006, Manuel Aguirre published in Lima, Peru, his first novel Una bala en la frente, with the publishing house Estruendo Mudo. In 2007, he published Reyertas y desafíos, a book of short stories, with the publishing house El Santo Oficio. In 2010, the French publishing house Les Fondeurs de Briques translated Una bala en la frente into French (as, Une balle dans le front) and published it in France, where it received an excellent literary review from the renowned literary critic, Mathieu Lindon, in the pages of the nationally syndicated newspaper Liberation (October 21st, 2010). In April 2013, the publishing house Planeta-Perú published, in Spanish, a revised and augmented version of Una bala en la frente, in Lima, Peru. In October 2016, he published, through Create Space, the English version, paper back, of Una bala en la frente, with the title, "A Bullet in His Forehead", currently for sale in amazon.com/books, and in its digital version, in Kindle (amazon.com).