The Dancer Upstairs: A Novel [Paperback]

Nicholas Shakespeare (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2002

The Peruvian guerilla leader Ezequiel is responsible for tens of thousands of fiendishly cruel murders, yet he consistently eludes capture. But in Agustn Rejas he has an indefatigable pursuer. From secluded city streets to the paths of a mountain village the policeman persists, tracking and anticipating Ezequiel's every move. Rejas' only reprieve is his love for his daughter's beautiful dance teacher--until he begins to pick up unmistakable signals that her circles--and Ezequiel's--intersect.
Based on the extraordinary manhunt for the leader of Peru's notorious guerilla organization, The Shining Path, The Dancer Upstairs is a story reminiscent of Graham Greene and John LeCarr--tense, intricate, and heartbreaking.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Striding purposefully out into vintage Graham Greene and John le Carré territory, British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare tells a haunting, violent story about a military policeman from a country very much like Peru and his lifelong mission to track down an infamous rebel leader very much like the head of the Shining Path terrorist group. The tension builds slowly but beautifully, as a journalist in search of a story becomes instead an important player in the history of an embattled country. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Taking the recent turmoil in Peru as his starting point, Shakespeare (The Vision of Elena Silves) has written a gripping literary thriller in which a detective's pursuit of a terrorist leader expands into a many-layered tale of politics and love. Traveling in Brazil in search of a story, British journalist John Dyer is flabbergasted when he stumbles on Agustin Rejas, a former police colonel from an unnamed Latin American nation much like Peru. Rejas is the man who captured the infamous Maoist rebel leader known as President Ezequiel, a character patterned after Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru's Shining Path. For years, Ezequiel had terrorized his country with a carefully orchestrated campaign of violence. Dyer plays the role of staggered, awestruck audience to the account of how Rejas stalked and eventually trapped his dangerous adversary. Night after night, Rejas pours out his story to the spellbound Dyer, telling of his own rural upbringing, his troubled marriage to a bourgeois princess and his growing affection for his daughter's ballet teacher, an impetuous, idealistic young woman with her own ideas about the future of their country. Shakespeare crafts his narrative with patience and skill, ratcheting up the tension with excruciating precision. Rejas's chilling tale of murderous 12-year-olds and the everyday menace of life in a nation caught in a deadly struggle between a repressive government and terrorist revolutionaries is riveting. While the character of Dyer never emerges satisfactorily from the role of convenient framing device, Shakespeare more than compensates for this minor shortcoming, delivering an unusually powerful examination of what animates the souls of those who choose-or are forced-to play even small parts upon the stage of history. Film rights to John Malkovich.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (February 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385721072
• ISBN-13: 978-0385721073
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #576,048 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intense Thriller about Peru, February 8, 2003

By 

Smallchief - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Dancer Upstairs: A Novel (Paperback)

Shakespeare has turned out a tense and frightening tale. "The Dancer Upstairs" is about the violent and ultra-radical Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) insurgency in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. The protagonist is Agustine Rejas, a policeman, who hunts down the guerilla leader, Ezequiel. Rejas reminded me of Arkady Renko, Martin Cruz Smith's Russian policeman in "Gorky Park" and other novels. He is an honest, decent, incorruptible man, whose virtues are little valued by the society of which he is a part.

Shakespeare tells a compelling story with literary flair and Reyes and the supporting cast, especially the guerilla Ezequiel, are strong, interesting characters. That is fortunate because the story is seriously marred. The author, for no good reason, relies heavily on several incredible coincidences to advance his story. Any hack detective story writer could have come up with a more inventive and believable way to tell his story than Shakespeare does. That being said, "The Dancer Upstairs" is still a cut above than the average political thriller. If you like Graham Greene or John Le Carre, you will probably like "The Dancer Upstairs."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Worthwhile Read, April 1, 2010

By 

zorba (Bala Cynwyd, Pa USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Dancer Upstairs: A Novel (Paperback)

This gripping story, a fictionalized account of a real wave of terrorism, is more than just a thriller. Author Shakespeare deftly weaves in an intense love story, a political thriller and a treatise on the Indian culture of the Andes. Shakespeare writes with passion, yet passion disciplined by a formidable control of the English language. This is a beautiful book, if that word can be used in a novel that centers around carnage. And, oh yes, if you are a fan of the dance, this book will be right up your alley. I found it a very enjoyable, compelling book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Compelling, December 29, 2005

By 

J. Fu "just your normal guy" (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dancer Upstairs: A Novel (Paperback)

Typically I have little patience for white men's stories about indigenous cultures, or political commentaries disguised as dramatic fiction. Superficially, The Dancer Upstairs is both of the above -- a mixed-race man in a mixed-race society, continually confused and yearning for what he knows not, and others like him, none realizing that it is all the same, that no one has the answers, not even el presidente Ezequiel. And yet the book is neither of these two things, for it is, at its heart, a love story. The unknowability of the human heart. The inevitability of fate. Suffering. The liquid richness of time -- how certain moments contract into nothingness and yet others expand in our memories, on and on, until we are nothing but those memories, nothing but a physical relic of those vapors of time.

The book is beautiful -- the entirety of it thoughtful and graceful like a dance. South America's vibrance is channeled through each page, and particularly via the large brown eyes of Yolanda. In Rejas, the main narrator, we find compassion, sensitivity, and an overwhelming humanity. He lives as if on the fringes of his own life, continually making space for the desires of others -- his wife Sylvina who yearns for Miami, his daughter Laura who lives to dance -- until he meets Yolanda, Laura's dance teacher, who brings out within him desires that can never be put to rest again. The story ends in what I can only call a collision -- but a collision that the reader has foreseen, and anticipates, perhaps as absolution. And even after the story has long ended, I find myself wanting to retread the steps up to the narrow balcony of the Catina de Lua, and imagine that Rejas and Dyer are due to reappear at any minute, and that Rejas will begin anew, to murmur of his past, and that I will listen humbly, as we all do, when faced with a tale of great sacrifice.