Death In The Andes

by Mario Vargas Llosa

book data

501 ratings, 3.54 average rating, 55 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		14%
4		39%
3		32%
2		11%
1		1%

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published

October 3rd 1996 by Faber And Faber Ltd. (first published 1994)

details

Hardcover, 256 pages

literary awards

Premio Planeta (1993)

isbn

0571175481 (isbn13: 9780571175482)

description

A controversial novel set in an isolated, run-down community in the Andes. Part detective story and part political allegory, it offers a panoramic vie…more

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Feb 17, 2009

miaaa rated it:

(review of isbn 0140262156)

bookshelves: favourites

Read in February, 2009

recommended to miaaa by: Ronny

Every time I heard and think of South American, the people, the skin colour, the prehistoric civilisation, and even the sound of southern American I relate those to one word. Exotic. Exotica.

Is that all?
Apparently NO.

I generalised South American as one, I forgot just like Indonesia with thousand of ethnics and languages spread-out through the archipelago, South American people are varied as well.

Did I say exotic word before? I was fooled. I did not kno...more

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3 comments

Aug 13, 2008

Steve rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

bookshelves: fiction

Read in August, 2008

recommended to Steve by: Adam

This was an odd duck. At first I wondered about the translation, but Grossman is an old hand, so I'm not laying the reading experience at her feet. I'm a big fan of Llosa's War of the End of the World, which is pretty much an epic. With this one, it seems he wanted shrink his focus -- but still have it be a big novel that says things. Whatever. The numerous flashbacks got on my nerves (in English they seemed clumsily handled), and at times even manipulative, thus draining important scenes of the...more

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Feb 14, 2009

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

bookshelves: latin-american, literature, politics

Read in February, 2009

Hhmm.. I hate it when a search for the ISBN number yields a result clearly not the same as the bk I'm reading. My copy of the bk has 247pp & the one listed here has 322. That's a pretty significant difference. I'm not surprised that the cover's different or that the publication date's different but 75 extra pages?! Maybe the edition listed is larger print or whatever. Or it cd be a mistake - after all, it's listed by Amazon & I frequently find mistakes in their postings. Whatever. I won'...more

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Jan 16, 2010

Brendan rated it:

(review of isbn 0312427255)

bookshelves: 2010, fiction, mystery

Read in January, 2010

We read this book for my mystery reading group, but it's hardly a mystery, traditional or no. Death in the Andes tells the story of two downtrodden Civil Guards who find themselves stuck at a remote outpost where they may be overrun by Communist rebels (of the "Shining Path") at any moment. To add insult to injury, several locals have been disappeared and the policemen can't help but wonder where they've gone.

Llosa writes in a stream-of-consciousness style, mixing voices an...more We read this book for my mystery reading group, but it's hardly a mystery, traditional or no. Death in the Andes tells the story of two downtrodden Civil Guards who find themselves stuck at a remote outpost where they may be overrun by Communist rebels (of the "Shining Path") at any moment. To add insult to injury, several locals have been disappeared and the policemen can't help but wonder where they've gone.

Llosa writes in a stream-of-consciousness style, mixing voices and time periods together in a sometimes confusing melange. That said, the book is interesting and compelling, if a bit slow. A few thoughts:

* The pace maintains the tension that haunts the main characters, who wait for their own deaths in the mountain shack where they've been stationed. The grim nature of "we could be killed at any moment" pervades the book.
* It becomes evident that the villagers have become entranced by the bartender and his wife. As one of my book club colleagues pointed out, the nature of their cult is quite Dionysian. The woman urges the villagers on their drunken revels, and helps them pick who shall be sacrificed. The grim specter of the Shining Path revolutionaries haunting the jungles around the village are allegorized by these superstitious villagers. The moral: people are able and willing to be vicious for many reasons.
* As a mystery, the story's not very satisfying. While the detective does make a nominal attempt to solve the murders, it's pretty secondary to the other elements at work in the story. My mystery group was most displeased.
* The narrative style, weaving past into conversations in the present and mixing tales of different characters, takes some getting used to. In the end, I appreciated what the book was trying to do, but felt the story becomes far secondary to the style.
* I would have liked for the publisher to make a bit more effort to provide connection points for non Peruvian readers. I think a short introduction about the political history of the region and perhaps a glossary at the back would have been nice.
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Jul 02, 2009

Gordon rated it:

(review of isbn 0312427255)

Read in July, 2009

I read this novel while traveling in Peru, which certainly added to its impact for me. Death in the Andes is about the era of the Sendero Luminoso terror campaign which was at its height in the 1980's and early 1990's, and killed tens of thousands while uprooting hundreds of thousands more who migrated from the highlands to the big cities, especially Lima. At the time, I understood very little of what the Sendero Luminoso was about, and the US press couldn't seem to make any sense of the organ...more I read this novel while traveling in Peru, which certainly added to its impact for me. Death in the Andes is about the era of the Sendero Luminoso terror campaign which was at its height in the 1980's and early 1990's, and killed tens of thousands while uprooting hundreds of thousands more who migrated from the highlands to the big cities, especially Lima. At the time, I understood very little of what the Sendero Luminoso was about, and the US press couldn't seem to make any sense of the organization or its objectives, other than labeling it as "Maoist". Since even China had rejected Maoism by this point (Mao died in 1976), this was puzzling to say the least. Peru? Maoist movement? Who are these people anyway?

The best analogy I can come up with for what Sendero Luminoso was about is that it was like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Recall that the Khmer Rouge were the fanatics who were so extreme that they took to killing people who wore glasses, on the theory that this meant these people were probably bourgeois and hence counter-revolutionary. Both the Khmer Rouge and the Sendero Luminoso wanted to destroy the old order completely, both thought that the best was to do this was to kill all representatives of that old order, and both figured that this gave them license to slaughter everyone from mayors to police to teachers to shopkeepers to engineers to gay people -- along with members of other leftist organizations for good measure. In Peru, if you were anything other than a simple, poor Andean peasant, you were fair game for the Sendero Luminoso. And when the peasants didn't go along, they too became fair game. Ironically, the Sendero Luminoso leadership came out of Peru's universities, and the crazed supreme leader was a former professor of philosophy by the name of Dr. Abimael Guzman. When he and other leaders were captured in 1992, Sendero Luminoso largely collapsed. Even today, however, it still carries out rare attacks on the Peruvian police and military in the Peruvian highlands.

Enough of the history and on to the novel. The narrative technique is unusual, jumping from one narrative thread to another, like a TV drama with three or four parallel sub-plots. You need to pay attention or you quickly get confused. That said, the narrative carries you along very powerfully. The Andean landscape is bleak, life there is even bleaker, and all the main characters live under the constant threat of death at the hands of the Sendero Luminoso. They seek escape in story-telling of better times or in the mythology of the Quechua-speaking Indians, descendants of the Incas. Myth and reality grow entwined, and bad things happen.

I discovered that this was not a good book to read before bed if I wanted to sleep well. (Of course, it could have been just the altitude). With that caveat, I found this book a great introduction to Peru and to the work of Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's greatest novelist.(less)

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Jan 23, 2009

Lynn rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in January, 2009

I am really getting into Vargas Llosa. I probably got into this book more than other people because I spent a month in Peru last year. He really captures Peru beautifully - the combination of modern rural slum, Andean landscape, violence, and precolonial mysticism. Plus the macho themes and characters are a good contrast to the mostly feminine material I read. And his books are short!

He also has this really skillful way of intertwining the past and the present into the same descriptio...more

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Oct 29, 2009

Ebtihal Abuali rated it:

(review of other edition)

bookshelves: latin-america

Read in October, 2009

يمكن القول ان عنصر التشويق العالي في هذه الرواية كان الدافع الاساسي لإنهائها في وقت قياسي!
تضم هذه الرواية بين جنباتها العديد من الحكايا، تبدأ بالعريف ليتوما ومساعده اللذان يجدان نفسيهما في ناكوس، معسكر العمال الأشبه بمقبرة وسط الانديز، باحثين عن حل للغز اختفاء بعض الرج�...more

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Aug 09, 2008

Madhuri rated it:

(review of isbn 8408065696)

bookshelves: fiction, latin-american

Read in August, 2008

It begins as a mystery – a civil guard trying to find three men who have gone missing in a mining village of Peru. But even from the beginning, the mystery only seems to be in the background, somewhere hovering only in the mind of this guard and ignored by everyone else. Even the guard seems only to be flirting with this mystery, and is more distracted with hearing the love story of his adjutant and commenting on the social fabric of the village. Llosa spends a long time painfully detailing th...more It begins as a mystery – a civil guard trying to find three men who have gone missing in a mining village of Peru. But even from the beginning, the mystery only seems to be in the background, somewhere hovering only in the mind of this guard and ignored by everyone else. Even the guard seems only to be flirting with this mystery, and is more distracted with hearing the love story of his adjutant and commenting on the social fabric of the village. Llosa spends a long time painfully detailing the romantic escapade of the young adjutant, on the other hand he fleetingly flips through many sublets that he opens and closes in the story. There are several characters in the book who hold centerstage for a while, as Llosa explores their thoughts, ideas, stories – but quickly brings them to a violent death at the hands of Sendaristas (the Shining Path Rebels), to return to the love story.

I don't know whether it is a positive of Llosa's work that the political motivation has been completely ignored in the book. The Sendaristas have been glossed over. They appear only to kill or punish or plunder, and remain as unexplained and mysterious as the pishtacos, the mythical vampires. It is almost as if they had no motives or reasons for the violence, and are only fulfilling the purpose of keeping death alive in Andes. Perhaps Llosa is being unjust to the rebels in doing so, or perhaps it is his polite way of rejecting their ideals completely. Once the villainy of the Sendaristas is completely established, they are suddenly dropped, and the ancient Peruvian love for death and sacrifice turns into focus. I suppose Llosa himself continuously experimented with the possibilities and followed them to a certain length till they appealed to him, and then abandoned them once they became stale. In a way, it does lead to some charm to the story, but to me the confusion created is slightly more compelling than this faint charm.

What is good in the book to me is the presence of many characters. It presents a collage of several stories, all leading to wasted lives, and you feel a certain gloom in every page. (Except the love story, which even though the main plot, appeared to me an anomaly in this tale of despair) For that matter, even the love story is sort of doomed, but the adjutant is so juvenile that it is impossible to feel depressed with his love.

I also loved the interplay between past narration and current dialogue. Especially, the civil guard's comments interspersed in the adjutant's story make it very interesting – it is like watching a trash movie with friends – you keep interjecting with comments, and later you can never separate the movie from those evil comments.

For all its failures, the book does succeed in inspiring fear. You see a land seeped in violence, and you can feel that the perpetrator of this violence or the cause is immaterial. From the ancient times, it is a land that has lived and breathed violence and worships spirits that demand death. Perhaps it is too imaginative a notion, but perhaps it is true that you cannot escape your history and continue to pay homage to it.
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Apr 14, 2008

Jason Williams rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in December, 2009

I already know that I dislike Vargas Llosa's politics. I'm not pro-Sendero, either (I'm not old enough to be). But I think the way he elides the presence of right-wing militarism and torture and shifts it onto the Senderos is disingenuous. Llosa is also a bit of a Graeco-phile, which also tends to annoy me, especially in a story that's supposed to be about contemporary highland Peru.

But the story itself didn't do much for me, anyway. The praise coming from North American press sp...more

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Feb 22, 2007

علی rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

bookshelves: novels

بسیاری از آثار ماریو بارگاس یوسا به فارسی برگردانده شده است. آنها که من دیده ام: "زندگی واقعی آلخاندرو مایتا"/ حسن مرتضوی (ترجمه ی بدی نیست)، "سال های سگی"/ احمد گلشیری(ترجمه ی خوبی ست)، "عصر قهرمان" / هوشنگ اسدی(ترجمه ی خوبی ست)، "مردی که حرف می زند"/ قاسم صنعوی،...more

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Dec 24, 2008

Valerie rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in October, 2008

I read this book before my travels to Peru. I am very glad I read one of his books so I was familiar with one of the most famous Peruvian authors.. gave me a conversational topic with the locals. Overall, the book isn't one that EVERYone needs to read, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. At first I wasn't super happy with his style of writing, not sure who was speaking when and if it present tense or past, but after a bit it settled in, and overall was coherent.

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Aug 05, 2009

Jenny rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in August, 2009

This was a rather dark and compelling mystery--I'm really glad I didn't read it before my trip to Peru last year! I thoroughly enjoyed Llosa's enticing style. It was a bit tricky to figure out if the narrator was in the present or re-telling the past, but I got used to it. There were loads of vivid, thorough images of the sierra, the mountains, and the people who lived there during the time of the anti-government geurrilas. I think I'd like to read more of his work.

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Mar 17, 2008

Adam rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

This might be a five star book but I’m going to have to think about it for awhile. A masterful meditation on violence and its roots in politics, poverty, sex, and folklore; and a portrait of the mountain people caught between government indifference (and malice), the seemingly irrational violence of the Shining path rebels, and the harshness of the landscape. Told through flashbacks, and variety of intertwining stories this book has a love story, murder mystery, the bizarre tale of a Dionysian...more

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Apr 28, 2009

Marilyn rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in January, 2007

I have a picture in my mind of a village high in the Andes. It is wet and muddy and miserable. The miners who live there gather in a hovel of a bar to dull their miseries. Death stalks the town and superstition reigns. It is as vivid as if I'd been there. I can't find the book or remember the author and then my son calls to tell me about this great book: Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa. And there it is. Now I'd like to read it again but it is thousands of miles away with my son. ...more

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Sep 24, 2008

Katie rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in September, 2008

This was a good read. It provided thoughtful insight into the political life and struggles in Peru- especially highlighting the rivalry between the coastal elites and the highland working-class. The violence that has been a constant presence in Peruvian history is at its worst in the 1980s with the various guerrilla groups: the setting of this book.

I read this book for class and definitely enjoyed it. It was a much better way of getting a feel for Peruvian politics and culture witho...more

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Sep 03, 2007

Gargamel rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in August, 2007

dont be fooled by the 3 stars, this is a well-written novel. im just not sure how much i liked it. what are these star ratings supposed to signify, anyway? this was among the more disturbing books ive read recently, not least because i am just back from Andean Peru and experienced such a different country than the one Llosa writes about. while nominally about the investigation of a few missing/murdered people in an a mining town, its more about the grim degradation of humanity that we too ea...more

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Jun 16, 2009

Sloane Berrent rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

bookshelves: read-on-trip-to-south-america

Read in February, 2009

Books my Llosa are everywhere in South America. I would like to read more of his works, I started with this story about a village in Peru. It definitely had South America flavor and i recommend this author whether or not you're traveling to S.A. to experience the sounds, sights and flavors described in words of the culture there by this author.

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Jun 07, 2009

Libyrinths rated it:

(review of isbn 0312427255)

Read in June, 2009

Good, but not as good as other Vargas Llosa I've read. Still, it's hard to find a bad book by him. Gives a dark picture of the people, their lives, the various cultural beliefs, political situations in Peru. Also includes a strange -- because transplanted -- Bacchus-like character and events. I appreciate Vargas Llosa's keen eye.

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Aug 12, 2009

Sarah Stew rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in September, 2009

I liked this book more in theory than in execution. On the one hand, I really liked the way that this book brought out the influence of indigenous culture in South America as I believe that this is something that often gets filtered out of the sanitized version of Latin America that we get in the states. I definitely thought that the individual vignettes we get of the blue collar, hopeless construction workers the main characters, Lt. Lituma and his adjuant Carreno, are sent to protect. But t...more

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Aug 02, 2009

David rated it:

(review of isbn 057117549X)

Read in August, 2009

I read this while traveling in Peru. The Sendero era that Vargas Llosa conjures is quite different from the Sacred Valley tourist circuit, but this haunting portrait of a dark period in Peru´s history is best understood if one knows a little Spanish and has a grasp of recent Peruvian history. Not for the casual reader.

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