SOURCE: Eder, Richard. Review of Death in the Andes, by Mario Vargas Llosa. Los Angeles Times Book Review (11 February 1996): 3.

In the following review, Eder describes Death in the Andes as “less successful and more awkward” than Real Life of Alejandro Mayta but notes that Death in the Andes is “in some ways more haunting.”

In the Andean regions of South America, travel is by altitudes; new worlds, climates and cultures are discovered not by going north, south, east or west but by going up or down. Those who live at the temperate altitudes (sea level to 4,000 or 5,000 feet) experience physical and psychological malaise when visiting the much higher cities of La Paz and Cuzco, a malady locally called soroche.

In a much broader sense, soroche is the theme and illness in a new novel by the urbane, prodigiously gifted Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He is a lowlander...