MOUNTAINS OF TROUBLE

By Paul Gray

AT ONE POINT A CHARACTER IN Death in the Andes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 276 pages; $24) finds himself in a government office in Lima "facing a photograph of the President of the Republic, who seemed to look at him sardonically from the wall." It is an odd moment for the reader because, had recent history turned out differently, that photograph might have been of Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990. Of course, had Vargas Llosa won that election, he almost certainly would not have had the time to write Death in the Andes.

And that would have been a shame, for this novel marks a return to the high literary intensity that Vargas Llosa had mastered before his temporary detour into Peruvian public life. It is an attempt to track down, through the labyrinth of fiction, experiences that defy rational explanation.

The novel begins with what might have been a simple puzzle: three men have recently disappeared from the remote Andean village of Naccos, and Corporal Lituma and his adjutant, Tomas Carreno, want to find out what happened to them. The two protagonists are members of the Peruvian Civil Guard assigned to this village, where work is inching ahead on construction of a government-financed highway. Although the guardsmen are supposedly there as keepers of the peace, they know the mountain people regard them at best with mistrust. "To tell the truth, you have to be pretty dumb to join the Civil Guard," Corporal Lituma tells his colleague. "The pay is lousy, nobody can stand you, and you're the first one they blow up with dynamite."

Lituma knows--indeed, everyone in the Andes seems to know--that the Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, is gaining control in the region. To underscore this point, Vargas Llosa inserts flashes of Sendero violence throughout the early portion of his narrative: the stoning to death of two young French tourists and a prominent ecologist visiting from Lima; the slaughter of a herd of vicunas being raised as a cash crop for the local economy; the invasion of a village in which residents are persuaded to massacre one another.

Still, Lituma does not believe that Shining Path, for all its ferocity, is behind the vanishing of the three men he was supposed to protect. "Does Sendero ever disappear people?" he wonders aloud. "They just kill them and leave their leaflets behind to let everybody know who did it." Instead, the corporal directs his attention to the husband and wife who own the dreary bar where the construction workers gather each night: Dionisio, who, as his name suggests, is a prodigious reveler in his own establishment, and Senora Adriana, who reads palms and is regarded by her customers as a witch.

Questioning these two gets Lituma nowhere. Adriana's replies are particularly obscure and Delphic: "All these hills are full of enemies. They live inside. Day and night they weave their evil schemes," she tells him. After listening to such divinations, Lituma mordantly imagines the report he might telegraph back to his headquarters about the missing men: "Sacrificed in manner as yet undetermined to placate evil spirits of Andes, stop. Written in lines of hand, witness claims. Case closed, stop."

But by the time the last page is turned, Death in the Andes manages to make this mock message seem as plausible as any other explanation. For though Lituma is on the path of a whodunit--and one that is eventually, if ineffectually, solved--Vargas Llosa is pursuing the bigger question of destiny and its sway over human affairs.

The Andean landscape provides an ideal perspective for this long view. "There was a lot of life here because there was a lot of death," muses Senora Adriana. She means, in essence, that the rugged, remote, inhospitable terrain gives its inhabitants few incentives to settle into the soothing fictions of civilization. "You people from the coast are very sophisticated, aren't you," Dionisio replies after Corporal Lituma rails against the superstitions of the mountain people. In his pursuit of a solution to the mystery that obsesses him, the Civil Guardsman fails to notice the mockery inherent in the question.

Edith Grossman's English translation of Vargas Llosa's Spanish is generally smooth and readable. In a couple of instances, however, more care might have been taken to avoid cliches in the adopted tongue. A paragraph that contains both "like the palm of his hand" and "manna from heaven" should have been rewritten. Still, the language of most of the novel reflects the magic of "that strange color somewhere between violet and purple" that Vargas Llosa discerns where the Andes meet the sky. Indeed, there is a spookiness about this novel, one that is hard to convey. But Vargas Llosa's meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people who perch there for the span of their lives ultimately merge into a surreal portrait of a place both specific and universal.