Perhaps politician/writers are endowed with talent in some ratio to the level of civil distress in their native land. Thus, while Americans are spared from widespread terrorism and mayhem, we have to make do with Newt Gingrich's third-wave, fourth-rate sci-fi potboiler. Peruvians get their feet collectively held to the fire for the past 20 years by the Shining Path guerrillas, but in 1991 they got a chance to cast their presidential ballot for Mario Vargas Llosa, an elegant writer who has just published his eleventh novel, a detective story that combines elements of both terror and mysticism.

Vargas Llosa has not so much left politics as he has poured it into his fiction. "Death in the Andes" chronicles the struggles of civil guard Corporal Lituma, sent to watch over a road-building crew in a wild Peruvian highlands town. Three villagers have recently disappeared, either at the hands of the Shining Path or through the intercession of the resident spirits of the high peaks. The Andes have seen violence before, going back as far as the bloody battles between the Inca and their enemies. Vargas Llosa wonders if what is going on in Peru "isn't a resurrection of all that buried violence. As if it had been hidden somewhere, and suddenly, for some reason, it all surfaced again."

We hear not just from Lituma in this novel, but also from the ragtag collection of peasants, whores, madmen, and foreigners who've found their way inland. Through them, Vargas Llosa builds an image of Peru that's rational and fabulous at the same time, a self-contained mystical world, 99 percent of whose pain can be explained by human stupidity and greed. As a Danish researcher, who barely escapes from a stoning by terrorists, tells Lituma, Peru is "a country nobody can understand. . . And for people from clear, transparent countries like mine, nothing is more attractive than an indecipherable mystery."

Nothing, that is, except a mystery told with perception and style. There are ghosts and riddles behind every rock in the Andes, and Vargas Llosa uses them to make a little clearer the politics and people of his country.

-- Edward Neuert