More Matter: Essays and Criticism by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Essays, Literary Criticism, Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780449006283
Google: Ov6OEEkZ5aMC
Amazon: 044900628X
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1999-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

These elements are all here, in this recently published novel, but present in a desiccated, rather cursory form, as though carried in the author’s head too long. Lituma, equipped with an adjutant, Civil Guard Tomás Carreño, is the head officer in the Andean village of Naccos, once a mining center but now economically dependent on a road project employing two hundred laborers. Three men—a mute, an albino, and a highway foreman—have mysteriously disappeared. Lituma, as a man from the coastal district of Piura, is uneasy among the Quechua-speaking serruchos, the mountain people. Further, he is under constant threat of attack by the terrucos, the Sendero Luminoso terrorists, who haunt and afflict the region. Still, with the help of his Quechua-speaking adjutant, he worries away at the mysterious disappearances, his suspicions falling upon a dissolute couple who run the local cantina, Dionisio and Doña Adriana. The mystery is finally solved, but not before Lituma, in the shack where the two Civil Guardsman sleep, has heard Tomás tell, in lovingly circumstantial detail, the story of his love affair with a showgirl, Mercedes, whom he impulsively rescued from a noisy session of rough sex with a drug dealer he was supposed to be guarding.

This intricately stratified novel also provides lectures from an Inca-phile gringo on Andean prehistory and folk religion, and some reminiscing interior monologues of Doña Adriana’s, and chilling descriptions of terrorist attacks on innocent people and vicuñas. The Sendero Luminoso episodes are underplayed, tersely conjuring up the mixed innocence and ruthlessness of the terrorist bands:

Daylight advanced rapidly across the plateau, and their bodies, their shapes, stood out clearly. They were young, they were adolescents, they were poor, and some of them were children. In addition to rifles, revolvers, machetes, and sticks, many of them held large stones in their hands.

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