La maestría de Mario Vargas Llosa se hace patente en estas páginas, un impresionante mosaico de situaciones humanas a las que sólo un escritor de su calibre podía dar tanto dramatismo y profundidad
En el campamento minero de Naccos en las montañas del Perú han desaparecido tres hombres. El cabo Lituma, asignado a esta zona, vive agobiado por el misterio de las desapariciones y no cesa en su intento por dar con los responsables de estas muertes. Con su adjunto Tomás, se hallan sumidos en un ambiente bárbaro y hostil de desconfianza generalizada, donde se funden mito y realidad bajo la constante amenaza de los guerrilleros maoístas del Sendero Luminoso.
Como contrapunto a este drama colectivo está la historia íntima de estos personajes, en especial la de un antiguo amor de Tomás, que él mismo narra en forma de episodios intercalados que se dan en las noches de desvelo y conversaciones con su superior.
El aliento mítico de la narración, en la que se entrevén otras muchas siluetas enérgicamente trazadas, infunde una extraordinaria vida a realidades que se observan de un modo implacable y minucioso, haciendo de esta novela un clásico.
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“Meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people who perch there . . . merge into a surreal portrait of a place both specific and universal.” (Time )
Haunting... powerful and suggestive... Death in the Andes is [Mario Vargas Llosa’s] Heart of Darkness.” (Los Angeles Times )
“Fascinating...often brilliant...one of the greatest of his generation of Latin American novelist.” (New York Times Book Review )
“Well-knit social criticism as trenchant as any by Balzac or Flaubert . . . This is a novel that plumbs the heart of the Americas.” (Washington Post Book World )
“Peru’s best novelist -- one of the world’s best.” (The New Yorker )
“Remarkable...a fantastically picturesque landscape of Indians and llamas, snowy peaks, hunger and violence.” (Wall Street Journal )
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Language Notes
Text: Spanish
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edition.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936. In 1958 he earned a scholarship to study in Madrid, and later he lived in Paris. His first story collection, The Cubs and Other Stories, was published in 1959. Vargas Llosa's reputation grew with the publication in 1963 of The Time of the Hero, a controversial novel about the politics of his country. The Peruvian military burned a thousand copies of the book. He continued to live abroad until 1980, returning to Lima just before the restoration of democratic rule.
A man of politics as well as literature, Vargas Llosa served as president of PEN International from 1977 to 1979, and headed the government commission to investigate the massacre of eight journalists in the Peruvian Andes in 1983.
Vargas Llosa has produced critical studies of García Márquez, Flaubert, Sartre, and Camus, and has written extensively on the roots of contemporary fiction. For his own work, he has received virtually every important international literary award. Vargas Llosa's works include The Green House (1968) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1975), about which Suzanne Jill Levine for The New York Times Book Review said: "With an ambition worthy of such masters of the 19th-century novel as Balzac, Dickens and Galdós, but with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James . . . Mario Vargas Llosa has [created] one of the largest narrative efforts in contemporary Latin American letters." In 1982, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to broad critical acclaim. In 1984, FSG published the bestselling The War of the End of the World, winner of the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta was published in 1986. The Perpetual Orgy, Vargas Llosa's study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, appeared in the winter of 1986, and a mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, the year after. The Storyteller, a novel, was published to great acclaim in 1989. In 1990, FSG published In Praise of the Stepmother, also a bestseller. Of that novel, Dan Cryer wrote: "Mario Vargas Llosa is a writer of promethean authority, making outstanding fiction in whatever direction he turns" (Newsday).
In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of his native Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society. In 1996, Death in the Andes, Vargas Llosa's next novel, was published to wide acclaim. Making Waves, a collection of his literary and political essays, was published in 1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, a novel, was published in 1998; The Feast of the Goat, which sold more than 400,000 copies in Spanish-language, was published in English in 2001; The Language of Passion, his most recent collection of nonfiction essays on politics and culture, was published by FSG in June 2003. The Way to Paradise, a novel, was published in November 2003; The Bad Girl, a novel, was published in the U.S. by FSG in October, 2007. His most recent novel, El Sueño del Celta, will be published in 2011 or 2012. Two works of nonfiction are planned for the near future as well.
En lo personal me parece uno de los mejores y mas entretenidos libros de Vargas Llosa, te mantiene enfocado en cada una de las paginas , las historias se entrelazan, van y vuelven, y en lo literario es tan bueno que casi puedes oler lo que describe con palabras. no dejen de leerlo
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This novel meant the came back from the political to the literary world of Vargas LLosa. The novel tells the story of a Civil Guard, Lituma, that is sent to a post in Naccos, the Andes. Once in there , he will try to solve what happened to three missing men. The novel is an excellent mix of peruvian mythology, Sendero Luminoso and Love.
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I think it is an excellent novel written by Mario Vargas Llosa. It reflects the deep world of Perú in the very difficult 80s. I remember the economics problems, the death and the violence in that time. I feel sad about the negative critics because the novel speaks about the peruvian reality. I recommend the novel, I lived that bad and terrible time of the Peru and Vargas Llosa does not write lies.
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