The twenty-four hour train ride from La Paz, Bolivia, to Arica, Chile, through the Andes at an altitude of up to 14,000 feet, from which the railway descends to the sea, provides the “closed room” setting for a murder which takes place in 1952, somewhat akin to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The key difference, however, is that the passengers on the Andean Express are, for the most part, local people traveling for a variety of reasons, and not wealthy Europeans traveling for pleasure. Their issues and resentments are local, based on their long histories with the victim, a man so loathsome that few can find anything positive to say about him. The murder, when it occurs, is of a man who has no friends, a man about whom it was said, “Killing Alderete would not be murder; it would be a settling of accounts.”
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Though Mario Alvarez likes to think of himself as a hero created by one of the great writers of hard-boiled crime stories, he recognizes that, in reality, he is something of a romantic, “a lover of the impossible, a dreamer.” He 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, a seedy hotel in which his room is like “a cell for a Trappist monk.” While he’s awaiting his interview with U.S. officials, he comes to know some of the other inhabitants of the hotel, all of them with their own problems. Mario has all the papers he needs for his visa, but when he hears that the consulate will actually need to verify his documents and may even use detectives in their investigation, he flees the consulate, knowing that his papers will never stand up to even cursory scrutiny—and “if they deny you once, they’ve denied you forever.” Published in Spanish in 1994, this novel is reputed to be one of fewer than a dozen novels from Bolivia to have been translated into English–in this case, by Adrian Althoff in 1997.
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Dense with ideas and complex in its plots, Turing’s Delirium confronts the issues of globalization and the conflicts generated by a perpetual underclass. Within a thriller set in Rio Fugitivo, Bolovia, author Edmundo Paz Soldan, described by Mario Vargas Llosa as “one of the most important Latin American writers of the new generation,” brings social unrest to life in this Third World country. Though young intellectuals have always relied on strikes, demonstrations, and indigenous riots by miners and other laborers to emphasize their grievances, they now have a new weapon, the computer. Now it is possible for the resistance and revolution to be conducted in cyberspace, and hackers are the front line in the waging of the new war. The main character, Miguel Saenz, also known as Turing, was nationally famous in the 1970s as a code-breaker, but he is now in charge of the archives of the Black Chamber, the Bolivian security agency. He has recently received a coded message which was hacked into his own computer, “Murderer, your hands are stained with blood.”
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Pedro Zabalaga, with a freshly minted PhD from Cal Berkeley, is a professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Madison (New York), a young man much in demand by American magazines as a commentator on the political situation in South America, and Bolivia, in particular. Pedro is the son of Bolivian hero Pedro Reissig, one of six men massacred by the army as their socialist cell was meeting to plan the overthrow of President Montenegro. Reissig died in the 1970s, when his son was still a small child, and the only legacy young Pedro has is a book his father has written entitled BERKELEY. This he regards as “a long letter from Dad to me. By discovering the message he had hidden in the book, I would discover him…”
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