A comic police-procedural, of all things - far lighter in tone than
the equally investigatory The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta but also
a better example of how deftly and smartly Vargas Llosa can cut the
fictional cards (and how deeply he's been thinking about the
properties of narrative). In Peru during the 50's, a young Air
Force cadet is found murdered and mutilated. The half-breed cadet,
Palomino Molero, was draft-exempt yet joined the military anyway.
Why? For love, it seems - love for the colonel's daughter, a love
that for a number of reasons (race, class rank) cannot be. But is
it reason for slaughter? It falls to two absolutely hapless hick
Civil Guards - Officer Lituma (the narrator) and Lieutenant Silva -
to investigate the case, and it's on their wheels that the fun
zooms. Silva is lust-crazy for a particular local (quite hefty)
married woman, and spends most of his time thinking, talking, and
dreaming of her. Meanwhile, he "interrogates" various witnesses and
suspects in the cadet's murder, getting them to answer questions he
never asks, to make connections he's too sex-woozy to have
formulated. Through it all, though, Lituma is convinced that Silva
is another Sherlock Holmes. The denouement - involving the colonel
of the cadet corps, and a spurned suitor of the daughter's - is
ambiguous (is anyone telling the real story?): this conclusion
circles back to Silva and Lituma's approximate style of
truth-finding, as though Vargas Llosa is suggesting that any
testimony is true, whether "objectively" false or not. More in the
vein of Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter than his other recent
novels, the playfulness is the thing here, and hard to resist.
(Kirkus Reviews)
This is a novel of guilt and innocence and the impossibility of
justice in an unequal society. In Peru, an airman is found brutally
murdered. Two policemen set out to investigate, but they are not
glamorous detectives they do not even have a squad car and have to
hitch rides on chicken trucks and cajole a cabdriver to take them
to the scene of the crime. The author has written "Aunt Julia and
the Scriptwriter", "The War at the End of the World", "The Real
Life of Alejandro Mayta", "Captain Pantoja and the Special Service"
and "The Perpetual Orgy".
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