“She’s an idealist like you,” her friend, an engineer involved with a foreign-aided reforestation programme, explains to their terrorist captors. “She wants a better life for the campesinos.” But it is to no avail: “This is war and you are a lackey of our class enemy… His terrorist movement has been responsible for the worst violence and bloodshed in modern Peruvian history and, for a time, it succeeded in making the country virtually ungovernable.
Observing the bizarre antics that take place in the sierra village of Naccos are two Civil Guards, Lituma and Carreno – a sort of South American Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – both decent men of humour and goodwill, whose task it is to investigate a series of unexplained disappearances.Lituma is a pragmatist, a man from Piura on the coastal plain, who is mystified by the strangeness of life in the mountains, while his adjutant Carreno can think of little else in their lonely outpost apart from his beloved Mercedes, the first woman he has ever slept with, whom he rescued from the hands of a rapist, lost and subsequently regains. As if the unseen presence of these evil spirits were not bad enough, the Quechuan-speaking Indians who inhabit the remote Andean communities, the descendants of the Incas who once held majestic but bloody sway here, are still in the grip of Sendero Luminoso (the “Shining Path”), the outlawed Maoist guerrilla organisation which, until his capture in 1993, was presided over by the sinister professor, Abimael Guzmn.
The tutelary spirits that have dwelt among the bleak mountain peaks and valleys of the Peruvian Andes since pre-Colombian times, and which man has traditionally placated with blood offerings and sacrifice, inform every page of Mario Vargas Llosa’s disturbing but compelling new novel. In the rarefied atmosphere of the high cordillera, where condors soar and vicuna roam, where the lead-coloured rain sheets down and the winds howl, spirits sow panic and confusion, while huaycos cause landslides and diabolically possessed pishtacos are said to dry out and drain their victims’ bodies, collect their fat and grind hypnotic powders from their bones. But at times he can seem merely stuffy, out to impress us with long words. It’s not my cup of tea; but you have to give him credit for essaying.’Making Waves’ by Mario Vargas Llosa, Faber pounds 15.99′Giving Offense’ by JM Coetzee, Chicago’The Double Flame’ by Octavio Paz, Harvill pounds 14.99′High Tide in Tucson’ by Barbara Kingsolver, Faber pounds 9.99′Let it Bleed’ by Gary Indiana, Serpent’s Tail pounds 11.00′Anatomy of Restlessness’ by Bruce Chatwin, Cape pounds 15.99′Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character’ by Cynthia Ozick, Pimlico pounds 12.50 (pub 19 July). Barbara Kingsolver writes lovely flowing letters about her house and family, while Octavio Paz ransacks the library for historic references to the philosophy of love.I didn’t include one of his bon mots in the above list, because quips are not really his line.
He prefers to filter lofty abstractions into a grand-sounding lyric: “In the face of the logical and ontological impossibility of deducing being from nothing, Plato posited a demiurge who mixed together pre-existing elements to create, or more exactly, recreate the world.” Paz is a great and distinguished writer with great and distinguished interests – love, for instance He has won the Nobel Prize and heaven knows what else. His essays are trips to Disneyland, tours of the porn industry or jolly put-downs on class enemies. Coetzee takes a less larkish, more theoretical interest in the mazy issues of censorship and liberty and is, of course, majestically long-sighted; leaving Mario Varga Llosa to skip earnestly from Che Guevara and Andre Breton to Maradona and the John Wayne Bobbitt affair. She finds it demonic and therefore locks it out.”Cynthia Ozick: “In the long run, fiction bruises character.”Gary Indiana: “You know you are in trouble when the lyrics of popular songs start making you cry before breakfast.”Well, not everyone can be Pope. Apart from their shared desire to give us the benefit of their wisdom, there isn’t much to connect these writers. Cynthia Ozick is a literary critic of terrific refinement: she writes of Henry James and TS Eliot as if they had just been staying for the weekend, and ponders the significance of such related matters as memory, envy, ethics, language and sloth with energetic delicacy.Gary Indiana, meanwhile, is a reporter from the front line of the sexual- political playground of American life.
