ABSTRACT
Ilan Stavans notes that a group of Latin American “mainstream” writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar, have renovated the detective genre, parodically stylizing it as they adapt it to their historical and regional surroundings and bringing it a Latin American personality (42). Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, as the author of several criminal mysteries set in his homeland, is one of these writers, yet his detective novels also unveil secrets in the ethical and socio-political landscapes of Peru. In his 40-year career, Vargas Llosa has published a series of novels concerning a variety of crises in Peru, among which Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes, 1993) is unique. It is the first novel written after Vargas Llosa’s defeat by Alberto Fujimori in Peru’s presidential election in 1990; it marks a new start for the writer; and, unlike all his previous novels, the story is set in the Andes. The writer himself states: “The Andes does not appear in my books or rarely appears, I believe for one reason, because my experience of the Andean world is poor and insufficient.”1 Death in the Andes, then, seems to be a break-through for the author, who sets off to solve mysteries in this area by following police sergeant Lituma, a recurrent figure in his fictions.2 This study examines the detective’s crime-solving journey in a world of harsh nature, guilty communities, conflicting ideologies, and desperate struggles for survival; it tries to access the Andes in the text as a literary and ideological space with multivalent meanings of “the postcolonial,” and to explore the role the detective plays in a critical and “transhistorical” stage, a stage that does not follow any idealist expectation of progress but rather becomes a site of conflicts among different faiths.
