Death in the Andes

Mario Vargas Llosa

Jim sent me some books last week and included in that wonderful package was Death In the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa. This is not an author I ever would have turned my attentions to on my own, and that's one of the reasons I love this place, because so many great authors would pass me by if it weren't for the barn.

Llosa knows the craft of writing and this book gives praise to that. Set against the backdrop of the Andes, you head straight into the mysterious disappearance of three men, the passionate story of a young man who has known the joy and agony of his first love, and underneath those stories, always rushing the novel along, are the tensions of political unrest which pervade this land, often matched against the dark superstitions which the natives of Peru cling too. What leaves the reader knowing they've discovered a very skilled writer is the fact that Llosa takes all of these elements and ties them so neatly together to give you a novel which never stumbles on itself. By the time I was nearing the end of this story, I was turning back to the first pages to see what else he had written, because here is an author worth pursuing. Thank you Jim! This was a great discovery.