Fear and Loathing in Peru

Death in the Andes, by Mario Vargas Llosa
Two decades ago I read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and laughed out loud and loved every word of it.  It was then made into a cheesy Hollywood movie called “Tune in Tomorrow,” in which they gave it a stupid title, removed all traces of wit, and inexplicably changed the ending.   Nevertheless, the movie starred Keanu Reeves, one of America’s greatest actors (well, one of the handsomest, at least), so I watched it anyway.  (The book is better.)  But I digress.  I don’t know why it’s taken me more than 20 years to read another book by Mario Vargas Llosa, but he’s become one of my favorite Latin American writers.  If you haven’t read Aunt Julia you should definitely put it on your list.

Death in the Andes is quite a different novel, though equally engrossing.  Two civil guards are assigned to a remote mining town in the Andes where a government highway project is underway.  The area is plagued by attacks by the Shining Path guerrillas and three men have gone missing.  Caught in between are the inscrutable locals, distrustful of the civil guards, who are known for atrocities of their own.  As with Aunt Julia, Vargas Llosa intertwines stories within stories as the two civil guards get to know each other and the locals.  There is a murder mystery, love story, political intrigue, tales of the supernatural, culture clashes, and scenes of shocking violence.  In short, it is a novel of modern Peru.  There was a general feeling of fear and dread as I read it, and the ending was disturbing, to say the least.  But I really liked it.

One small complaint about this book, or rather, the translation: there are a lot of Spanish words in it that are never translated into English, so you are left to figure them out by the context.  (I really do need to learn Spanish.)  “Sendero Luminoso” is easy enough to figure out, but there are references to “terrucos,” “seruchos,” “pishtacos” (which makes me think of fish tacos) - the pishtaco legend figures prominently in the plot - and other Spanish words where an English word would have worked.

The main character in this book, Lituma, appears in an earlier novel called Who Killed Palomino Molero? so now I will have to read that, too, among other things...