First published in 1993 and sadly overlooked by mainstream world literati, Death in the Andes from Peruvian novelist and 2010 Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa is a monumental modern classic, a complex work that dares to explore challenging social and political constructs, and in doing so indirectly delves into the very essence of Latin America. While a reader unfamiliar with Llosa’s oeuvre may be tempted to mistake the novel for a detective story, a closer look will reveal layers upon layers of fascinatingly convoluted sociocultural commentary.
On the surface, Llosa opens his intricate narrative as a missing persons investigation with Civil Guard Corporal Lituma and his young assistant Tomás Carreño arriving in the remote mining village of Naccos to probe the mysterious disappearances of three men amid the conflict between Peruvian government forces and Sendero Luminoso Marxist rebels. Before long, however, Lituma and Carreño, both from the relatively prosperous and developed Lima coastal region of Peru, find themselves in a precarious situation, surrounded and outnumbered by secretive, Quechua-speaking, mountain dwelling serruchos whose brutality, superstition and pre-Columbian ways make the hapless duo feels akin to aliens from another planet.
Death in the AndesIn his masterful work Death in the Andes, Mario Vargas Llosa paints a grim, gritty picture of a collision of two irreconcilable worlds. The ongoing clash between traditionalism, exemplified by shamanic rituals, and modernity, represented by Lituma’s deductive approach, is set in a lush mountain hamlet against the turbulent socio-political backdrop of early 1990s Peru. Pervaded by an atmosphere of dread, its characters haunted by an unseen shapeless menace that seems to inhabit every hill of the Andean highlands, the novel offers an exuberant portrayal of a life on the fringes of modern society and the contemporary Western psyche. Far from the magical realism so often employed by other masters of Latin American literature in works such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Llosa’s vision is stark and unforgiving, the subject matter of his work often times dark and unsexy, his novel clearly not an offering written for export. An overlooked classic. Highly recommended.
Facing the formidable mountain landscape, rich in ancient myths and malevolent spirits, Lituma begins to doubt his original supposition that the missing men were taken by the terrucos, the Sendero Luminoso militia. As more bizzare and even supernatural possibilities surface one after another, legends of pishtacos, Carreño’s short vignettes of his love story with Mercedes, the ramblings of local witch Doña Adriana and her husband Dionisio’s diabolical laughter all combine with large amounts of pisco to form one thick, impenetrable brew in the minds of the two outsiders. Far from solving the case, the newcomers soon find themselves wishing they could only leave this godforsaken outpost in one piece to return to the hotbed of civilization in Lima.
Llosa expertly weaves his story, rich in descriptors and cultural references but never too slow or superfluous in its mesmerizing detail. Carreño’s romantic substory is elegantly interwoven with Lituma’s search for the missing men as if to make up for lack of action in the gray present with juicy flashbacks from a happier past. However, what really sets the novel apart from similarly themed works is the abundance of mystical elements Llosa manages to explore by means of casually introducing the reader to ancient Incan legends and folk tales.
The final verdict? A shamefully under-appreciated masterpiece by one of Latin America’s greatest writers and most certainly the definitive work of fiction for anyone interested in the traditional culture of Peru.
