Volume 43, Number 8 · May 9, 1996
Terror in the Mountains
By Michael Wood
Death in the Andes
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 276 pp., $24.00
There is a kind of detective fiction, most brilliantly and hauntingly practiced by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, in which the solution of the mystery is only the start of things. What matters is not so much the crime as the danger of knowing anything about it. The detective patiently puts the pieces together, for example, and discovers exactly why the apparent accident was not an accident—only to learn that everyone else in the town has always known this. He then gets killed, the victim of what used to be his ignorance: he learns too late and too publicly what he should have known he didn't want to know.
Review, 2436 words
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