The mystery of Peru: Investigations of Mario Vargas Llosa

Mystery and its major literary expression, detective fiction, constitute arguably one of the major poetics of our time. With its representation of various social and cultural fields throughout the twentieth century, mystery has become a "classical" resource for literary production meanwhile the detective genre itself has become a "mystery" in literary consumption. This study examines the criminal cases in three of Mario Vargas Llosa's novels: La ciudad y los perros, Quien mato a Palomino Molero, and Lituma en los Andes, following a survey of mystery writing among "mainstream" Latin American writers, and the critical conceptualizations by Vargas Llosa and others regarding mystery in fiction. The three texts each address some major problems in both the constructions of their crime mystery and their writing of the Peruvian world. They can be viewed as a whole, representing a thematic and structural expansion beyond the traditional detective genre. My research follow on problems surrounding the detective figures, questions of justice and punishment posed by the solutions to criminal cases, the manipulations of power and the police procedure as a literary function in the textual system, the textual relationship between myth and mystery, and the reader's participation and re-investigation of the problematic solutions. All the above aspects constitute a path to access the literary workings of the narrative and Latin America's cultural and literary realities. The mysteries in the three texts provide some answers to the question of how to write mysteries in a world where the social conditions and the modus operandi are different from the central places of the West, since they represent, on the one hand, certain directions in which mystery narrative takes within and beyond the generic dimension, and on the other, the task of writing Latin America that undergoes transformations and challenges in different cultural scopes.