The Book Beat January reading group selection is Death in the Andes by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. Our meeting will be held Wednesday, January 28 at 7 PM both inside Book Beat and online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent by email the day of the meeting. If you’re interested in attending please send us your name and email.
Death in the Andes (1993) by Mario Vargas Llosa is a novel that blends a detective story with political allegory, set in a remote Peruvian Andean village during the Shining Path insurgency. The plot follows Corporal Lituma as he investigates the disappearances of three men, uncovering a mix of guerrilla violence, local superstitions, and ancient rituals, while his assistant Tomás tells a parallel story of a lost love. The book explores themes of violence, cultural conflict, and the complex relationship between modern Peru and its indigenous past. The novel won Spain’s Premio Planeta de Novela in 1993 and was translated into English in 1996 by Edith Grossman.
“Well-knit social criticism as trenchant as any by Balzac or Flaubert . . . This is a novel that plumbs the heart of the Americas.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Remarkable . . . a fantastically picturesque landscape of Indians and llamas, snowy peaks, hunger, and violence.”
—Raymond Sokolov, The Wall Street Journal
“Meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people who perch there . . . merge into a surreal portrait of a place both specific and universal.”
—Time
“Without fictions we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion. Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers.”
–Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Mario Vargas Llosa (born March 28, 1936, Arequipa, Peru—died April 13, 2025, Lima) was a Peruvian Spanish writer who was one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature, particularly as a leading figure in the boom of 20th-century Latin American literature. Blending political thought, realism, and personal experience in his writing, Vargas Llosa was noted for his commitment to social change, evident throughout his novels, plays, and essays. In 1990 he was an unsuccessful candidate for president of Peru. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
-Brittanica Encyclopedia