El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox Above and The Fox Below …), José María Arguedas' posthumous novel, is a complex and extraordinary document. One must ask at the outset how to take this passionate book. (p. 39)

The book consists of three diaries and a "Last Diary?," in which, in effect, the author achieves the final balance and decides on his death [by suicide]. Between these diaries there has grown, with agonizing difficulty, a novel that is to remain unfinished. There are no fictional relations between these diaries and the novel as such; the relationship is more an internal one. Arguedas writes his diaries when the depression or the profound uneasiness he is suffering prevent his going on with the novel. The first of them opens with his decision to kill himself, but it is evident that the act is being postponed by the...