As I prepare for an eventual visit to Peru -- perhaps next year sometime -- I find myself entranced by the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Last month, I read The Storyteller, about the natives of the jungles of Peru and their myths. Here, in Death in the Andes, we move up into the peaks of the Andes, at a place near Huancayo called Naccos, where the Santa Rita mine has given out and the road that is being built never seems to go anywhere.It is the early 1990s, during the rural terrorism of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. Bands of masked young people show up out of nowhere to render judgment and stone their victims to death. But even more implacable are the apus, the spirits of the mountains, who to this day demand sacrifice.In the middle of this starkness are two Civil Guards, Corporal Lituma and Tomasito Carreño. Lituma is bothered about three local men who have mysteriously gone missing, while Tomasito thinks only about his affair with an attractive young whore named Mercedes. For her, he had killed a gang boss called only The Hog for whipping her. So the two rural policemen live at cross-purposes, one smitten with a mystery, and the other smitten by his passions.In Vargas Llosa's work, the real and the unreal are sometimes interspersed, as when we see two of the missing men "come back" and relive their disappearance in front of Lituma's eyes. Is it the terrucos (the terrorists), or something older. When asked about the apus, a Danish professor replies:"The ancestral gods, the tutelary spirits of the hills and mountains in the Cordillera," replied the professor, delighted to speak about the thing he loved best. "Every peak in the Andes, no matter how small, has its own protective god. When the Spaniards came and destroyed the idols and the burial grounds and baptized the Indians and prohibited pagan cults, they thought they had put an end to idolatry. But in fact it still lives, mixed in with Christian ritual. The apus decide life and death in these regions. They're the reason we're here, my friends. Let's drink to the apus of La Esperanza."Vargas Llosa has a bit of fun with his readers, making them think the terrucos will play a bigger part in his novel than they actually do. Instead, they are merely part of a larger pattern of violence, what with earthquakes, massive avalanches (here called huaynas), and terrifying storms. Death in the Andes gave me a foretaste of the strange life of the Andes, both human and elemental.

This was an odd duck. At first I wondered about the translation, but Grossman is an old hand, so I'm not laying the reading experience at her feet. I'm a big fan of Llosa's War of the End of the World, which is pretty much an epic. With this one, it seems he wanted shrink his focus -- but still have it be a big novel that says things. Whatever. The numerous flashbacks got on my nerves (in English they seemed clumsily handled), and at times even manipulative, thus draining important scenes of their impact. On the other hand, the scenes of violence had me recalling the ending of O'Connor's "Good Man is Hard to Find." More than once. Something about those bleak Andean peaks (which Llosa describes very well) -- and the Evil that men do. If were to recommend a novel on the period in Peru, I would probably suggest Nicholas Shakespeare's The Dancer Upstairs. There was a so-so movie made of it, but I recall liking that novel a great deal.

I have enjoyed everything I have read by Vargas Llosa, so I am biased. This was a great read, I didn't want to put it down. I was quite surprised that it had a (relatively) happy ending, considering the whole novel is about the death and destruction brought on by terrorism and corrupt government.****I first read this novel in Spanish in June 2008. Three years later, I am reading it in English, planning to teach it in a freshman seminar, and trying to read it through the eyes of an 18-year-old.This time around, the novel seemed more vulgar (I guess the English words are more shocking to me than the Spanish), and Lituma less likeable. I still loved Tomás and his storytelling, and I still found this to be a masterfully written novel. But I was much more attentive to the misogynistic and racist language characteristic of Vargas Llosa's works. My love-hate relationship with him continues: I love everything he writes (above all, I love a well-told story) but I hate the blatant racism, elitism, misogyny, etc., that fill his pages. ****Read for the third time in Spanish, with a group of Spanish majors. Blown away again by Vargas Llosa, this time because I paid more attention to the numerous narrative voices that are woven together to tell this story. I don't understand why this novel is not more widely read. Despite my own issues with his ideology, he is undoubtedly a master of language, character development, and stylistic experimentation. In fact, I am tempted to give the novel five stars this time!****Read again in English and Spanish with students who don't understand how amazing this novel is. Frustrating. Also frustrating to reread all the horrifically racist descriptions of the serranos. Lots of emotions this time!