THE FOX FROM UP ABOVE AND THE FOX FROM DOWN BELOW

A “Critical Edition” of the late (1911–69) Peruvian novelist’s unfinished masterpiece, published in 1971, two years after the last of the troubled Arguedas’s several suicide attempts. Like his classic Deep Rivers, it’s a bitter criticism of inauthenticity in (Spanish-dominated) Peruvian urban culture, which is laboriously contrasted (to its detriment) with the superior spirituality and harmony with the earth of his country’s Andean Indians. But this is a great novel rather than a rant, because Arguedas’s roiling narrative contains dozens of vivid representative characterizations, a rich interweaving of symbolic and explicit discursive statement, and a fiery portrayal of a dissociated sensibility and soul enduring a “crack-up” whose end can only be death—and a hoped-for transfiguration. One of the landmarks of Latin American fiction.