8481302635

8408010476

8408010476

8439567278

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't change it.

ANYWAY, this took me a little over a day to read. It seems like it's been a long time since I whipped thru a novel that fast. I hesitated to read this, even though I consider Vargas-Llosa one of my favorite novelists. Why? I'm not even sure I 'know'. Maybe it's b/c there's almost always torture & murder involved - w/ this bk being no exception. I've read almost everything by him - including a Granta edition of interviews & the like from around the time when he was running for president of Peru. What?! Me liking a writer who was a somewhat serious presidential candidate?! Remember, this is Peru I'm talking about.. not the US. STILL, me liking the writing of a presidential candidate?!

Vargas-Llosa came to lecture or read or some-such at CMU sometime since I've lived in Pittsburgh. I didn't attend. I was told that a woman political activist harangued him. I reckon he's considered to have 'conservative' politics.. His political opinions, as expressed in the aforementioned Granta interviews, struck me as more cautious & bland than anything else - extremely naive, perhaps. &, yet, his bks are far from naive. I wonder if I wd've found the harangueing political activist an example of what I've come to think of as the "new Christinanity" - ie: the political activism that thrives on its own high-&-mighty holier-than-thou oversimplifications. Vargas-Llosa is far from oversimplifying. That's one of the main reasons why I love his work.

"Death in the Andes" is a novel about disappearances in a highly troubled area of Peru. The main investigator of these disappearances is "Corporal Lituma", a character that's appeared in at least one other Vargas-Llosa novel. The Corporal suspects the "Sendero" (Sendero Luminosa - the "Shining Path" Maoists of Peru) who're referred to as "terrucos" ('terrorists') & who're active in the area. This immediately both peaks my interest & complicates matters for me. Any group referred to as "terrorists" may very well be so by my standards but I always have to wonder whether whoever's calling them that may not represent something even worse. In other words, the state obviously relies on terrorism to maintain its power & relies on calling its enemies "terrorists" in order to defame them.

My impression, though, perhaps based on too little info, is that the Sendero were/are dogmatic militants w/ a hard party line. This impression is supported by "Death in the Andes" so it rings true for me. Here's a sample of the interaction between a Sendero & an ecological activist that they're about to execute:

"'Are you going to kill me?' she asked, hearing her voice break for the first time.

The one in the leather jacket looked into her eyes without blinking.

'This is war, and you are a lackey of our class enemy,' he explained, staring at her with blank eyes, delivering his monologue in an expressionless voice. 'You don't even realize that you are a tool of imperialism and the bourgeois state. Even worse, you permit yourself the luxury of a clear conscience, seeing yourself as Peru's Good Samaritan. Your case is typical.'

'Can you explain that to me?' she said. 'In all sincerity, I don't understand. What am I a typical case of?'

'The intellectual who betrays the people,' he said with the same serene, icy confidence. 'The intellectual who serves bourgeois power and the ruling class. What you do here has nothing to do with the environment. It has to do with your class and with power. You come here with bureaucrats, the newspapers provide publicity, and the government wins a battle. Who said that this was liberated territory? That a part of the New Democracy has been established in this zone? A lie. There's the proof. Look at the photographs. A bourgeois peace reigns in the Andes. You don't know this either, but a new nation is being born here. With a good deal of blood and suffering. We can show no mercy to such powerful enemies.'"

While Vargas-Llosa clearly considers the Sendero to be terrorists & while this writing can easily be classified as propaganda against them, just how unfair is it? I don't live in Peru, it's a hard call for me. The intellectual points presented above seem like a very clear analysis - nonetheless, it's being used to justify executions & any ideology used for that is repulsive to me. I'm not personally in any hurry to kill anyone. According to WikiPedia (another source of info that I usually respect but, nonetheless, see as having an unacknowledged suspect class agenda subtext), the Sendero have denounced "Human Rights" as it's usually understood by 'Western' 'liberal' culture in the following statement:

"We start by not ascribing to either Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the Costa Rica [Convention on Human Rights:], but we have used their legal devices to unmask and denounce the old Peruvian state. . . . For us, human rights are contradictory to the rights of the people, because we base rights in man as a social product, not man as an abstract with innate rights. "Human rights" do not exist except for the bourgeois man, a position that was at the forefront of feudalism, like liberty, equality, and fraternity were advanced for the bourgeoisie of the past. But today, since the appearance of the proletariat as an organized class in the Communist Party, with the experience of triumphant revolutions, with the construction of socialism, new democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, it has been proven that human rights serve the oppressor class and the exploiters who run the imperialist and landowner-bureaucratic states. Bourgeois states in general. . . . Our position is very clear. We reject and condemn human rights because they are bourgeois, reactionary, counterrevolutionary rights, and are today a weapon of revisionists and imperialists, principally Yankee imperialists.

– Communist Party of Peru, Sobre las Dos Colinas[31:]"

ANYWAY, I thought this was a great bk. Clashing cultures are presented in what seems to me to be a reasonably honest manner. The Civil Guard that the central character represents are hardly presented as the 'good guys' - most of them are shown as torturers, thugs, & thieves. But then what do I 'know'? I live in relative luxury in the primo Imperialist country of the world - surrounded by bks & videos & whatnot. I've got it good - even though I'm scum in this society. If I were a peasant in Peru I might hate Vargas-Llosa's guts - if I cd even have access to his bks & if I'd be able to read them - wch might be highly improbable. ( )