ario Vargas Llosa, who made a plausible bid for the presidency of Peru not too long ago, is certainly one of the greatest of his generation of Latin American novelists, and his talents and achievements are more diverse than most of his contemporaries ...
ario Vargas Llosa, who made a plausible bid for the presidency of Peru not too long ago, is certainly one of the greatest of his generation of Latin American novelists, and his talents and achievements are more diverse than most of his contemporaries can claim. His 13 previous books include examples of generational saga, murder mystery, panoramic historical novel, romantic comedy and political allegory. His 11th novel, ''Death in the Andes,'' appears to be an amalgam of several of these genres.
The new book, translated by Edith Grossman, is set in the mountains, location of Peru's most venerable history: ''There it was: immense, mysterious, gray-green, poverty-stricken, wealthy, ancient, hermetic. Peru was this lunar landscape and the impassive, copper-colored faces of the women and men who surrounded them. Impenetrable, really. . . . These were the real descendants of the Incas, not the people in Lima; their ancestors had carried the gigantic stones up to the aeries of Machu Picchu.'' But most of the story is told from the point of view of a man from the coast, Corporal Lituma, a police officer sent to a road construction camp in the remote mountain village of Naccos, as a token effort to protect the workers from the depredations of the Senderistas, the guerrillas of the Shining Path. A lowlander of Spanish descent, Lituma is unhappily puzzled by the Indians he has been sent among (''the serruchos, those damn mountain people,'' he calls them). ''Because you're mysterious and I don't understand you,'' he says. ''I like people to be transparent.''
Lituma is occupied by the fates of three men who have inexplicably vanished from the Naccos camp: Pedro Tinoco, a mute who was the servant of the corporal and his adjutant Toms Carreo; Casimiro Huarcaya, an itinerant albino; and a highway foreman named Demetrio Chanca. These disappearances stimulate the murder mystery element of the plot. But from the very beginning there are many distractions. For instance, Lituma is much involved with Carreo's running narrative of an absurdly naive love affair he recently had with a prostitute he abducted from a drug dealer for whom he was supposed to be a bodyguard; deftly interpenetrated with the present story line, this subplot flows through the whole length of the novel. Tales of the Senderistas and their victims also compete for attention. Amid this multiplicity of plot potential, the reader may share Lituma's difficulty in finding any central focus, or even in identifying a single continuous thread.
In the first half of the book, it looks as if that thread might turn out to be the path of the Senderistas -- also as if Mr. Vargas Llosa might intend an explicit commen
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