Customer Reviews

Lituma en Los Andes / Death in the Andes (Spanish Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

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.

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.

Not the characters in this narrative! It's the author's intellectual integrity that becomes "Lost in the Andes" (the title in English translation) of this short novel published in Spain rather than Peru. I can't remember a well-written novel in any language that has disgusted and outraged me as thoroughly as this one. Yes, it's a piece of craft, a compelling narrative written in beautiful Spanish. But it's also a dishonest self-exoneration, replete with cheap literary tricks and outright deceptions, and an arrogantly contumacious depiction of the indigenous culture of Quechua-speaking Peruvian villagers. It verges on pure propaganda for the interests of global capitalist "development" at the cost of the poor, already the most victimized people by conquest and colonialism on Earth. It's a brilliant, hateful book, all the more hateful in English because most of its North America readers will have no idea what's at stake in it.

First I'd better make my position clear, concerning Peru's "Shining Path" insurrectionary movement, which provides the context of this narrative. I do not in any way support or defend Sendero Luminoso. I don't approve their ideological fanaticism, nor do I condone their ruthlessness. Founded on "Maoist" extremism, they had every potential of duplicating the genocidal atrocities of Pol Pot if they'd succeeded in their revolution. Their analysis of the history of Peru - a blood-soaked horror from Pisarro to the present - was fundamentally correct; no historian would dispute most of it. Their rage against the oligarchy of wealth in Peru and the perpetual exploitation of that country by international capitalism was fully justified. But everything they derived from that analysis and that rage was insane. The portrayal of their inflamed cruelty in this novel is not inaccurate. They were indeed murderous. The problem is that "the other side" was equally or even more murderous, ruthless, unscrupulous, and without the hint of an excuse provided by history. According to the 2003 report by the NGO Human Rights Watch, the deaths and disappearances in the class warfare in Peru between 1980 and 2000 numbered just under 70,000; Sendero Luminoso was held culpable for only 46% of those crimes, with the military and rightwing militias guilty of the larger half.

In Vargas Llosa's novel, the Senderistas are a diffuse guerrilla network. They 'control' the countryside and descend on villages, work parties, and travelers at will. They include women and children as well as hard-eyed men in ski masks. Vargas inserts two full chapters in the novel solely to depict their insensate violence; in the first chapter, the Senderistas stop a bus, kidnap and slaughter two travelers - a young French couple charmingly 'in love' and innocent as babes. In the other chapter, the Senderistas capture, try, and execute a well-known environmentalist who has worked diligently on projects of reforestation, whom the guerrillas denounce as an unwitting 'running dog' of imperialism. However, these two chapters play no role in the overall narration. They are extraneous, and the style of their interpolation is blatantly propagandistic. Those ski masks, for instance! Ski masks were first worn chiefly by pro-regime military and militia personnel, around 1981. By the time of the fictitious events narrated in this novel, the countryside was just as terrorized by rightwing militias, called "rondas", as by Senderistas, yet no mention of the rondas appears in Vargas's narrative. The rondistas were evry whit as sadistic as the Senderistas; in 1983, for example, rightwingers stoned, set fire to, and eventaully shot a local opponent in the town square of the town of Lucanamarca. The first documented massacre of civilians by the Sendero Luminoso was a reprisal for the violence of the rondsitas. Yet in 1991, those ronda death squads were 'legitimized' by President Alberto Fujimori, as Committees for Self Defense.

Onward to the story: Corporal Lituma, an officer of the Guardia Civil, the national police, is assigned to 'protect' a highway-building party working in Naccos, a decaying mining town in the high Andes, populated by 'serruchos' - mountain people of indigenous Quechuan language and culture. His only aide is his young adjutant Carreño, a serrucho who has spent years in the lowland cities. The two are fearsomely isolated, distrusted by the villagers and the construction workers, certain that one day they will be attacked and slain by the shadowy Senderistas who have them surrounded. Three men have 'disappeared' from the village in recent weeks, and the plot of the novel focuses on Corporal Lituma's obsession with uncovering the truth about their fates. The presumption, of course, is that they were victims of the Shining Path. At the risk of spoiling the mystery, I have to state that the truth will be far more bizarre. The Senderistas never descend on Naccos. Meanwhile, huddled in their shack/office, the two policemen spend their evenings talking about ... what else? ... women! Carreño confesses the goofy/grizzly tale of his love for Mercedes, a prostitute from Lituma's own home town. It's a tale of comic escapades with bittersweet interludes. The two narratives - Lituma's efforts to solve the mystery of the three disappearances and Carreño's raunchy romance - are interwoven quite artfully. There's nothing wrong with Mario Vargas Llosa's literary performance, but there may be something seriously wrong, in an ethical sense, with his usage of semi-pornographic humor to counterpoise his essayism, his use of sex to palliate his political message.

There's a history behind the writing of this novel. In 1984, Vargas was assigned by the corrupt presidential dictator Belaunde Terry to a commission to study the massacre of eight journalists by villagers in the andean community of Uchuraccay. The resultant report was highly controversial, and many Peruvians were inflammed at Vargas Llosa. The writer's efforts at self-exculpation resulted in two novels fictionalizing the massacre: "¿Quien mató a Palomino Molero?" and "Lituma en los Andes". Vargas has used the surname 'Lituma' in several of his novels, be the way, and in "Death in the Andes", Lituma plainly stand in for the sensibilities of his author. Lituma despises the Andean villagers - the serruchos - who he sees as incomprehensibly superstitious, backward, depraved, xenophobic, bloody-minded, sexually degenerate. They and their accursed mountains are the obstacles to progress, symbolized by the highway that will never get built. Unfortunately, Lituma's fear and loathing of the Andean villagers exactly reflects the attitudes of Vargas Llosa, a man who chooses to live in London and to pontificate about 'progress' for Peru. By all accounts, Vargas Llosa really does regard the indigenous peoples of the Andes as more an 'economic problem' than as a cultural treasure. The future Peru he envisions has no place for economically inefficient villagers. And so, the portrayal of Andean culture in this novel is unremittingly derogatory. Those "indios", we are told, have always been inhumane idolators; even their Inca and pre-Inca ancestors were blood-drenched sacrificers of human flesh. Vargas inserts another character in the novel, in a single chapter, to lecture the reader on the gory history of the Incas; that character is a hippyish Danish ethnologist (with an incongruously Swedish surname) staying with the engineers at a mine a day's journey from Naccos. Lituma visits the mine to write a report, meets the ethnologist, and catches a hint from him about the mystery of the three disappearances. It's a clumsy device, however. The Dane is almost a "deus ex machina". He's there only to build Vargas's case against the indigenous peoples.

Does any of this justify my one-star rating of the novel? From a literary viewpoint, NO! That rating is my gut reaction to the writer's odious 'neoliberalism'. Vargas Llosa is a marvelous story-teller. I like him much better when he's funny, self-satirical rather than self-justifying.

It was ok. i was expecting more from Vargas Llosa!
It was sort of boring actually. The flow was kind of "here and there and everywhere"... I think that the presentation of the facts fell short and missed a lot of points. :-(