Word: andes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...POINT A CHARACTER IN Death in the Andes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 276 pages; $24) finds himself in a government office in Lima "facing a photograph of the President of the Republic, who seemed to look at him sardonically from the wall." It is an odd moment for the reader because, had recent history turned out differently, that photograph might have been of Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990. Of course, had Vargas Llosa won that election, he almost certainly would not have had the time to write Death in the Andes...
Lituma knows--indeed, everyone in the Andes seems to know--that the Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, is gaining control in the region. To underscore this point, Vargas Llosa inserts flashes of Sendero violence throughout the early portion of his narrative: the stoning to death of two young French tourists and a prominent ecologist visiting from Lima; the slaughter of a herd of vicunas being raised as a cash crop for the local economy; the invasion of a village in which residents are persuaded to massacre one another...
...full of enemies. They live inside. Day and night they weave their evil schemes," she tells him. After listening to such divinations, Lituma mordantly imagines the report he might telegraph back to his headquarters about the missing men: "Sacrificed in manner as yet undetermined to placate evil spirits of Andes, stop. Written in lines of hand, witness claims. Case closed, stop...
...return to the high literary intensity that Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa mastered before he detoured into public life with his unsuccessful 1990 campaign for his country's presidency. It's a welcome return, says TIME's Paul Gray. What starts as a simple murder-mystery puzzle in the Andes mountains rapidly becomes an attempt to track down, through the labyrinth of fiction, experiences that defy rational explanation. "There is a spookiness about this novel, one that is hard to convey," says Gray. "But Vargas Llosa's meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people...
...police officer were killed. The military terrorism court, where judges and other personnel wear masks, imposed a life sentence, ignoring the prosecutors' recommendation of 30 years in prison. Berenson will serve the term in a notoriously tough maximum-security prison reserved for terrorists that is located high in the Andes...