Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the Spanish language and Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversaci贸n en La Catedral, 1969/1975). He wrote prolifically across various literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. He won the 1967 R贸mulo Gallegos Prize and the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award. Several of his works have been adopted as feature films, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982). Vargas Llosa's perception of Peruvian society and his experiences as a native Peruvian influenced many of his works. Increasingly, he expanded his range and tackled themes from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa criticized nationalism in different parts of the world. Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was politically active. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and later identified as a liberal and held anti-left-wing ideas. He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democr谩tico coalition, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide. Vargas Llosa continued his literary career while advocating for right-wing activists and candidates internationally following his exit from direct participation in Peruvian politics. He was awarded the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes International Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2011, Vargas Llosa was made the Marquess of Vargas Llosa by Spanish king Juan Carlos I. In 2021, he was elected to the Acad茅mie fran莽aise.
According to one of Vargas Llosa鈥檚 principal characters, 鈥渓ife in Peru has its dangers, honey.鈥� And this is certainly the case during the nearly four decades of insurgency by the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. This conflict forms the background of much of Vargas Llosa鈥檚 work, but is a central theme of Death in the Andes.
Vargas Llosa frequently uses the peculiar geography of Peru to great effect. In The Green House, for example, he emphasizes the extreme conditions of the coastal desert and the far Eastern jungle to frame the fragility of much of Peruvian life. And in The Time of the Hero, the overwhelming presence of the Pacific Ocean dominates the mood of his narrative. In Death, he puts forward the Andean Cordillera itself as an active force in the existence of the country.
Unlike most regions of the world, the mountains of the Andes don鈥檛 form an international or political boundary. Rather they are literally the backbone of Peru and form the country鈥檚 central mass. Historically, the mountains were the seat of Incan and pre-Incan power. The Shining Path began its insurrection in the rugged mountainous area of the book鈥檚 main narrative; and the most brutal violence by both the rebels and the government took place there. In a sense the high Andes are the source of life and death as well as power for the country.
The mountain people, the serruchos, form a sort of Greek chorus in Death. They are the ever-present but virtually invisible remnants of the ancient cultures of the Incas, Huancas and Chancas which were all but destroyed by the Spanish conquest. Living in remote communities, they speak Quechua not Spanish. They form the bulk of the labour-force but are only marginally part of Peruvian society. They are also a mystery to the lowlanders of the coastal plains who fear them as both uncivilised and as potential terrucos, Shining Path terrorists. 鈥淚t isn鈥檛 race that separates us, it鈥檚 an entire culture,鈥� says the protagonist, a Corporal of the Civil Guard who is posted to protect a road construction crew in a remote village.
After a time, and a number of unexplained deaths, the Corporal discovers he has underestimated how different the serruchos really are. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e from another planet,鈥� he says. And it is unclear to him if the principal threat is the Shining Path, or the local workers or, indeed, the mountains themselves with their pishtacos (a sort of vampire who prefers human fat to blood), the ancient muki (devils who take revenge for misusing the wealth inside the mountains), and the apus (the protective gods of every mountain peak). The Dionysian (literally, since that is his name) proprietor of the cantina and his Orphic wife could well form the nexus of these spirit-forces as suspected by the Apollonian Corporal in his quest for psychic as well as social orderliness.
In other words, the insurgency may not be just a temporary event but an inherent and permanent part of the country itself, an echo of the historical violence of the cultures which have never quite disappeared, but are embedded somehow in the substance of the mountains: 鈥淲hat if what鈥檚 going on in Peru is a resurrection of all that buried violence. As if it had been hidden somewhere, and suddenly, for some reason, it all surfaced again.鈥� As it does not infrequently in the form of huaycos, great landslides which obliterate all merely human endeavors. This is perhaps why 鈥淧eru is a country nobody can understand.鈥� It is a country which consumes itself.
Peru seems to have become a product of its own violence accumulated over centuries and from which it cannot escape. The condition seems to be ingrained. 鈥淭he Chancas and the Huancas sacrificed people when they were going to build a new road... It was their way of showing respect for the spirits of the mountains, of the earth, whom they were going to disturb. They did it to avoid reprisals and to assure their own survival.鈥� Perhaps the mountains will always demand a similar sacrifice. 鈥淢aybe a whole tribe of apus had to be placated,鈥� in order for Peru to exist at all. Meanwhile, as the mystic wife of the cantina-proprietor says, 鈥渕usic helps us understand bitter truths.鈥� What could be more Dionysian?
鈥€€璍ituma en los Andes = Death in the Ands, Mario Vargas Llosa 鈥� Set in an isolated, rundown community in the Peruvian Andes.
Vargas Llosa's novel tells the story of a series of mysterious disappearances involving the Shining Path guerrillas and a local couple performing cannibalistic sacrifices with strange similarities to the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece.
Part detective novel and part political allegory, it offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society; not only of the current political violence and social upheaval, but also of the country's past and its connection to Indian culture and pre-Hispanic mysticism.
[7/10] A haunting and disturbing story, skillfully presented, but I hold Mr. Llosa to higher standards after including his sprawling, philosophical War Of The End of The World on my favorites list. I learned a lot now about modern Peru, which is why I picked the book up in the first place, but I also had issues with the muddled dialogue, with the slow pace, continually fragmented by flashbacks, and with a perceived bias against the Sendero Luminoso guerilla, who received an extremely harsh treatment as brainless, blood crazed terrorists.
I have seen a review on the net calling the book a Latin American version of Heart of Darkness , where instead of horizontal movement along an equatorial river, we get a vertical movement into the high Cordillera (Richard Eder). The comparison feels appropriate, due to the prevailing downbeat mood, the permanent danger and the soul crushing climate and isolation. Another connection can be made to the noir books, as the main plot deals with an investigation of three deaths / disparritions, and a secondary plot is a love story of a couple on the run from the local mafia (reminding me of James M Cain in particular).
The setting is Naccos, a semi abandoned, dirt-poor high altitude village consisting of a highway labour camp, a police post and a cantina for getting drunk after work. A sergeant (Lituma) and an Adjutant (Carreno) try to unravel the mystery surrounding three missing persons : a mute simpleton (Pedrito Tinoco) , an albino (Casimiro Huarcaya) and a team foreman (Medardo Llantac) . As we learn about their identities and backstories through flashbacks, the only apparent connections are the fact that they were all strangers for the local population, and they all had suffered grievously at the hand of the serruchos : the blood thirsty Maoist rebels who control the region and who could descend on Naccos at any moment. As if the stories of these three missing unfortunates were not enough, Llosa includes a couple more high profile atrocities commited by the serruchos against foreign tourists and against an environmental activist, which prompted me to suspect the novel is being used to vent the author's dissatisfaction with a government report he helped write on the reconciliation between the different factions in the civil war.
Coming back to the two policemen, they are linked by their lowland origins which makes them also outsiders among the imposing peaks and freezing nights of the Andes. The threat of a serrucho attack that they would be unable to resist hangs like Damocles sword over every moment of their stay in Naccos. Their only recurse is to turn their backs on the world and hold endless conversations in their dismal shack, which frankly makes an already glum novel even less appealing. Llosa experimental technique with dialogue, where he mixes up past and present from one line to another is not helping things along very much. It often feels like the two cops are holding a contest about who is the most depressed:
He took drag after drag on his cigarette, and his mood changed from anger to demoralized gloom. - Lituma.
I've never been so miserable in my life as I was here. - Carreno.
and an exchange between the two:
- I was tired of living. At least that's what I thought, Corporal. But seeing how scared I am now, I guess I don't want to die after all. - Only a damn fool wants to die before his time, asserted Lituma. There are some fantastic things in this life, though you won't find any around here. Did you really want to die? Can I ask why, when you're so young? - What else could it be? - Some sweet little dame must have broken your heart.
Some of the local details that give the novel its authentic flavour and kept me interested in the plot: - vicunas are a smaller version of llamas, living in the wild at high altitude, very shy animals whose fur is greatly appreciated in luxury clothing, and who are listed as endangered species. - apu are ancestral mountain spirits, their essence can get incarnated in condors, and they are often malefic - huaycos are devastating rockslides, send by angry apus according to the locals, probably caused by earthquakes to the scientific mind; - [edit] serruchos - are the local population, speaking in quechua dialect, the remnants of tribes older even than the Incas. ( You have to understand their thinking. For them, there were no natural catastrophes. Everything was decided by a higher power that had to be won over with sacrifices ) - pishtacos are the Peruvian version of vampires, feeding on human fat instead of blood, and using a dust made of powdered bones in order to put a glamour on their victims - mukis are a sort of gnomes hiding in the deep mines and scaring the workers - pisco is a distilate from wine, specific to Peru, and the drink of choice in Dionisio bodega.
Which brings me to the most interesting aspect of the book for me: the mystical component, the primeval myths and traditions that can be traced back to the stone age and illustrate peculiar similarities across continents. In our case, Dionisyio the barman is a clear reference to Bachus, and his witchy consort Dona Adriana is a maenad - one of the god's followers, achieving ecstasy through drink, dance and debauchery:
When we're dancing and drinking, there are no Indians, no mestizos, no rich or poor, no men or women. The differences are wiped away and we become as spirits.
Later new references are introduced to the bachanalia mysteries, secret practices reserved for the women and translated to preconquista cultures in the Lord of the Fiesta tradition: choosing a person to rule the festivities for one year:
He did some hard drinking, he played the charango or the quena or the harp or the tijeras or whatever instrument he knew, and he danced, stamping his heels and singing, day and night, until he drove out sorrow, until he could forget and not feel anything and give his life willingly and without fear. Only the women went out to hunt him on the last night of the fiesta
Whether these mysteries had anything to do with the disappearances, or if there are even older myths hiding in the heart of the Andes, is for Lituma to uncover and for the reader to wait until the last page.
I will close with my earlier reference to a 'noirish' love story. Llosa chooses to finish this plot line in an unconventional way, but I felt it was appropriate in underlining how the key to the story may be neither with Lituma's cynical atitude nor with Dionisio's escape into drink, but with the young adjutant's naive belief in a better world.
Isolation The story centres around two policemen posted to a remote region of the Peruvian Andes near Naccos. They are investigating a series of disappearances in a road construction camp and amongst the comuneros, (Indians from the traditional community) where there is a discouraging lack of evidence or support. The missing are a mute, an albino, and the foreman of the construction site. Is this significant in itself as somehow undesirables were targeted or is it a coincidence that can potentially distract from the real motive?
The backdrop to the investigation is a combination of political unrest, local distrust, supernatural myths and fear of the Shining Path guerrilla group. Despair and gloom seem to resonate throughout the story. Mario Varga Llosa, was himself involved in politics and ran for the presidency in 1990 and often felt Peru was losing its way to corruption and conflict and is quoted as saying
"How vulnerable democracy is in Latin America and how easily it dies under dictatorships of the right and left"
It is often felt that the books Who Killed Palomino Molero and Death in the Andes provided a literary cleansing regarding his involvement in the public investigation into the Uchuraccay massacre, where 8 journalists were murdered.
At a specific plot level, the lack of leads and motive behind the disappearances, mean the police investigation continues to remain elusive. At a wider level, there are the oppressing forces of the Senderistas and their conflict with the government and foreigners, the social culture, and the mythical legends of the creatures and forces that inhabit the jungles and mountains.
Death in the Andes is a wonderful insight into the culture and superstition of Peru especially during the terrorist campaigns of the Shining Path militia. The menacing atmosphere was palpable yet repressed, and the imagery of the region, with its jungles, remoteness, dangers and harshness, were expertly portrayed. The characterisation displayed many different aspects of human experiences and aspirations to create a story with depth, curiosity and intrigue.
My only criticism was that I found the story moved quite slowly at a subdued pace.
A dark and pretty uncomfortable novel, which was made all the more remarkable because at the same time there was a great deal of absurd humour running all the way through it. This was like a black storm cloud when compared to Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was the only other Llosa novel I'd read. Here there is some savage brutality, and characters that are both homophobic and that describe women as nothing more than sex objects. Along with the novel's indecipherable mystery of three missing men, there is a kind of sweet love story being recounted in short installments, which at least gave the novel something in the way of hope and goodness, because generally speaking Llosa doesn't paint a nice picture of his homeland Peru: and for good reason. This, more than anything else, is a political work that is clearly on the attack when it came to the crisis facing Peruvian society. The foreboding atmosphere was at times extremely intense, through the likes of dangerous landslides, guerrillas, cannibalism, and witchcraft. In corporal Lituma, the isolated and helpless central character trying to keep order in Naccos - the madhouse where he is posted, I came across one of the most pitiful and memorable in ages. Very well written, Llosa grabbed me around the neck, twisted my insides, and brought me to attention in admiration.
This was an excellent story with great characters and captivating narration. Lituma is now stationed in the mountains in Naccos (after being ejected from Piura after Palomino Molera and needs to solve a triple homicide which superficially looks like it may be the work of the Sendero Luminoso terrorists (whom we also gets glimpses at during the book through some of their victims). The pace never lets up and we also are treated to local folklore like in The Storyteller which plays an important part in the story as well. I liked the triple narrative framing of each chapter and found each character engaging and realistic. I enjoyed Death in the Andes very much even if its predecessors such as The Green House and The War at the End of the World pleased me even more. Mario Vargas Llosa is an extraordinary storyteller and novelist and this was another standout book for me.
So now I am really getting a feel for the Peruvian maestro (have had the pleasure to read five of his like 20 or so books). "Death in the Andes" is a horror story made comical, like most Latin American tragedies ("Before Night Falls," or "Kiss of the Spider Woman", or more recently, M.V.L.'s "The Feast of the Goat") which persist hard in trying not to be overtly sad. Thematically rich, with tragedy piled atop tragedy, the narrative flow is invigorating, forcing the reader to forget all about airport terminals and the general flying population; the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, the whole canvas is expertly painted. The interplay of magic is not as phantasmagorical as, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but the voice is distinct & literary. It is not as perfect a gem as that previously mentioned novel ("Goat"), but it has its own luster, its own vibrancy. I really can't think of a writer with more tricks up his sleeve than Mario Vargas Llosa!
兀卮賰乇 兀氐丿賯丕亍 丕賱賯乇丕亍丞 丕賱噩賲丕毓賷丞 毓賱賶 丕賱賵賳爻(賰賲丕 賯丕賱鬲 兀爻鬲丕匕鬲賷馃挄) 丕賱匕賷 賷孬乇賷 丕賱乇丨賱丞 賵賷囟賷賮 廿賱賷賴丕 乇賵丨 賱丕 鬲毓賵囟. And a special thanks goes to my dear friend Rahma for the out of the box choice and for bringing me out of my comfort zone and more important for introducing me to the wonder world of Llosa 鉂�.
Lituma, a Peruvian brigadier, was posted to a small village in the Andes, Naccos. All around lurks the threat of the Shining Path, a terrorist group that regularly executes villagers and travelers. In this tense context, three disappearances took place. Lituma in the Andes is a novel with complex construction, which requires a lot of attention from its reader to understand the pain of getting lost in the sequence of scenes. He mixes several narrative threads without clear typographical distinction and the links between the different stories appearing before the end of the work. But it's a well-written book with an exciting script and characters. The first reading of Mario Vargas Llosa is undeniably a success.
I first read this book in the 1990s but have just re-read it after encountering the main character, Corporal Lituma, in another of the author鈥檚 books, 鈥淲ho Killed Palomino Molero?鈥�
After his exploits in the earlier book, Lituma has been transferred to a remote police post in the Andes, staffed only by himself and his assistant, Tom脿s Carre帽o, who himself has ended up at the post after falling in love with a gangster鈥檚 moll called Mercedes. The post is located by a large camp of labourers building a new highway. Lituma鈥檚 position is almost the reverse of his situation in 鈥溾€alomino Molero鈥�. In this book, he is amongst Andean Indians and, as someone from the coast, is treated by them as an outsider who is not to be trusted. Three men have disappeared from the camp, and Lituma senses that he and Carre帽o are the only people who don鈥檛 know what has happened. When trying to investigate, he is met with a wall of silence from the labourers.
There are several threads to the book. MVL portrays the Andes as an otherworldly place, with a society impenetrable to outsiders, dominated by pre-Columbian religious beliefs. The novel was also written at the height of the insurgency by the Maoist 鈥淪hining Path鈥� organisation. They appear at several points and are portrayed (accurately I think) as utterly pitiless, utterly convinced of the rightness of their cause. Vargas Llosa is interested in people who think this way. They feature in many of his novels and he himself has said he is 鈥渂oth fascinated and repelled鈥� by such people. There鈥檚 one chapter in the book that vividly describes the Shining Path takeover of a small town. Another thread involves Carre帽o, who is incredibly innocent, telling Lituma about his romance with Mercedes. It lightens the mood a little, in what is otherwise quite a dark book.
MVL creates an oppressive atmosphere for this story, which in my opinion is one of the book鈥檚 most notable features. I found the novel compelling when I first read it and did so again on this occasion.