There’s been a brutal murder, a young local boy was tortured and nailed to a carob tree as if on a cross. The two local police officers of this tiny village in Peru set out to investigate. Complications set in since evidence immediately points toward the local military post, but Lieutenant Silva and patrolman Lituma carry on anyway.
Their short 19 day investigation seemingly solves the crime, but the two policemen are quite convinced nothing will come of the investigation and their formal report about it because of class differences – the perpetrators are from the military which tends to be whites from the middle and upper classes. The victim is a chola of the local population, an underclass boy of color, as are the police officers.
The novel and investigation move slowly, imitating the pace of life in the hot and tiny village, and it shapes up to be an “us” against “them” tale. Seemingly it is a murder of a local chola by someone or group connected to the military and the sub-text suggests nothing will be done to bring justice.
This marvelously written crime story wanders on slowly, yet the clever Lieutenant Silva solves the murder in less than three weeks.
At this point, only a short distance from the end of the tale, the novel explodes in depths we have a hard time imagining involving many aspects of human evil. We have conspiracy theories, mental illness, perhaps rape and incest, infidelity and sexual humiliation, rampant corruption and more. The ending is simply breath-taking.
Spanish-peruvian writer Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, is regarded as one of the creators (along with such writers as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes) of the new Latin American novel. He is a brilliant writer, seeming to understand human weakness to the core. In this novel he manages to build a pace of development which resembles a literary version of Bolero which simply explodes in the last 25 pages.
Vargas Llosa is recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, literally The City and the Dogs), The Green House (La casa verde), and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral). He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. Several, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, have been adapted as feature films.
He is the person who, in 1990, "coined the phrase that circled the globe", declaring on Mexican television, "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship", a statement which became an adage during the following decade.
Many of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, however, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism, to a sometimes playful postmodernism.
Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards liberalism or neoliberalism, a definitively more conservative political position. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with the Cuban dictator and his authoritarian regime.
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