Sunday 21 February
Have decided to start doing some pre-reading - not travel guides: something to help get me in the mindset of the countries we are heading to.
So I have loaded onto the i-pad "Red April" by Santiago Roncagliolo. It's a political thriller with black comic undertones set in the small southern Peruvian city of Ayacucho in the Andes where the Mao-inspired rural guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso – Shining Path – was active in the 1980s.
So far the book is an interesting read as it follows the exploits of the associate district prosecutor Chacaltana as he tries to solve the mystery of a burned body.
The author explores inter-relationships of Catholic and pre-Conquest religion, and the conflict of Spanish and Indian culture. There are elements of magic-realism too: the murder is entwined with barbarities, the magical beliefs of several characters, Holy Week with its rites of blood and torture, and the extreme cynicism of government (the novel is set during the era of President Fujimori - a Japanese-Peruvian citizen - who was jailed for murder and corruption in 2000 - after being denounced by his wife!). The politics of Peru are stranger than fiction!
The author Roncagliolo (born 1975) belongs to a much younger generation than Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the other writers of the Latin American boom. In 2006, he won the Alfaguara Prize for this novel.
Wednesday 24 Feb
Hot here today in Albury - 43 deg C.
I have finished the first book and got some interesting insights into 20th century Peru which has been marked by a series of military dictatorships and coups and the influence of the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) which waged a terrorist campaign against the central government from 1980 until the early 1990s and led to between 40,000 and 60,000 deaths and ‘disappearances’. Under the García government, millions of dollars were embezzled. One gets a sense of a country in economic and political chaos - not unlike some other South American countries!
Bribery and corruption apparently continues in Peru. And there has been a resurgence of Sendero Luminoso around Ayacucho where this book "Red April" is set.
A great read - it was engrossing from start to finish.
I have now launched into a second book - "American Visa" by Juan de Recacoechea which won Bolivia’s National Book Prize in 1994.
Mario Alvarez has come from Oruro to La Paz (Bolivia) to get a tourist visa for the United States, and he has only enough money for a week’s stay at the Hotel California.
It's a terribly sad read: the main character Mario is a real loser - in Spanish, un hombre cualquiera: an ordinary man with a strong survival instinct but his situation gets worse and one can see that he's on a "hiding to nothing" (which in fact literally happens).
Apparently this is described as Kafkaesque, but I wouldn't know because I have never read Kafka. If this book is any indication, I'm not sure I want to. (Apparently 'Kafkaesque' describes a style of writing of "surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger" - which definitely describes this book!).
Like the book above, the story of Mario's odyssey is again of the magical-realism genre which originated in Latin America where writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende made it popular. There are prostitutes, transvestites, cocaine addicts, mistresses, corrupt politicians, disrespectful American immigration bureaucrats, pimps, thugs, parties at the high-end of town and utmost squalor at the other (interestingly, this is at the higher altitudes where is it absolutely freezing and the urban landscape of La Paz seems truly grimy).
A very sombre read.
Thursday 24 March
Day before Easter. Doing some tidying up and uncovered a book I read last year - Mark Adams' "Turn Right at Machu Picchu". This is a great book as it helpfully explains Peruvian history and in particular the so-called "discovery" of Machu Picchu (a 15th century Inca site) by Hiram Bingham, an American explorer and academic from Yale. Of course it is a nonsense to suggest that Machu Picchu was discovered by Bingham; others had been there before many years before but the area become overgrown afterwards. Bingham re-discovered Machu Picchu.
Mark Adams was a magazine editor in New York; he set off to retrace the steps of Hiram Bingham who travelled to Peru in 1911 (and subsequent years). In fact, some of Bingham's work has been discredited in recent years: he did not correctly recognize Vilcabamba as the last Incan capital, instead misidentifying Machu Picchu as the "Lost City of the Incas".
Adams embarks on a truly mammoth trek which becomes a sort of detective story as to why this spectacular city was built in such a secluded location; and he has as his guide a truly quirky guide, John Leivers a 50+ year old Australian.
It's a fascinating story and a great pre-read for our trip to Peru.
