About this title: Corporal Lituma and his young adjutant investigate the sinister disappearance of three men in Andian mountains. The duo find themselves caught up in forgotten mountain communities and rituals--including a local couple performing cannibalistic sacrifices with a strange similarity to the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece.
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Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. 0374140014 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Good. 2004-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Description: Very Good. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Picador USA
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780312427252ISBN:0312427255
Description: New. No dust jacket as issued. NEW sofrtcover, no bumps or bruises--very clean, tight & bright! Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 275 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Excellent Conditon in Excellent Condition jacket. HardCover, Excellent Condition, clean/unmarked textblock, clean/unmarked, tight binding, minor edge/jacket wear, from a private collection. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 2007-10-02
ISBN-13:9780312427252ISBN:0312427255
Description: Like New. Shelfwear from storage in box with other books. Hardcover without jacket. Foxing on top edges. Collectible 1996 Farrar, Straus and Giroux printing. Great Copy. Ships Lightning Fast. read more
"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 the story overall was rather disappointing as none of the threads really fit together."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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