Should Your Book Group Take the Andean Express? (spoiler alert!)
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Would the Bolivian novel, Andean Express, by Juan de Recacoechea, be a good choice for a book group discussion?
It certainly didn’t turn out to be what I expected. Thirty pages from the end, I almost stopped reading. I wasn’t sure it was worth my time to finish it.
None of what I’d expected had occurred. All of the intense plotting that dominates the first half of the book – the Agatha Christie-type cast of characters, all with motives – really led anywhere. Just as in Christie’s 1934 classic, Murder on the Orient Express, where all the suspects turn out to be guilty because they all participated in the killing, in this novel all the characters are given perfectly good reasons for hating Nazario Alderete. It almost felt like it was going to be the 1952 Bolivian remake.
The only problem is, in this novel Juan de Recacoechea has clearly set up an assassin. We already know who’s been hired to kill Alderete, an entire chapter has been dedicated to setting up his maimed half-brother, who’s just waiting to spring out and get his revenge, and when the time comes, he does exactly that. So the whole build-up to the poker game, the trickery, the cheating, none of it really pays off. We may wonder how so many characters with reasons to kill the man could end up on the same train, and that will never be known.
I finished the book anyway. There was a nice surprise waiting for me, when we discovered who had paid Rocha to kill his half-brother. The real surprise, however, was that I found myself wet-eyed at the ending. The heart of the book turns out to not be about the murder at all. It’s about Ricardo falling in love.
In the midst of all this plot manipulation, pretty young Gulietta has determined that her husband Alderete is not going to get her virginity, she’s going to give it to Ricardo, the horny eighteen-year-old high school graduate on his first solo train ride who thinks he’s manipulating the situation. The boy is in way, way over his head. At the end, Gulietta has inherited her murdered husband’s fortune – she’s off to America, leaving her young seducer wild-eyed with frustrated love.
Ultimately, then, the novel is about class. Dona Clara, the girl’s mother, elegant and austere, avenges her husband’s suicide, and uses her daughter’s marriage to regain control of the property which Alderete stole from them. Also, Alderete is part-Indian. He has darker skin. He’s advanced into whiter society because of the money he stole. The plot is just a tad racist.
Some stereotypes, however, get turned on their heads. Once Ricardo and Gulietta are in bed, their roles are quickly reversed. She exhausts the poor boy, she’s ready to go another round, and bluntly disappointed that Ricardo can’t regroup more quickly.
My disappointment began during the poker game. It’s a huge set piece and exciting enough, but the villainous, outwitted Alderete just turns away from it. For all the time it takes up, the poker game doesn’t affect the plot at all. There’s no sense of real danger. When Alderete literally walks in on his new young wife Gulietta and Ricardo, naked in bed together, he doesn’t beat them or shoot them, he clutches his throat and staggers out. He’s then conveniently strangled to death by his one-legged half-brother whom he condemned to working in the mine.
So much of the business on this train ride turns out to be a lot of busy nonsense – but what worked for me was Ricardo making his way out to the boat at the end, desperate to see Gulietta before she sets sail, his boyish inability to accept that this fantasy come to life is about to end. The novel’s last line is, “With every passing day, though, the memories receded, little by little, until only faint images remained…” The wisdom of the ending, and finding out that the girl’s mother was the one who’d hired the assassin, changed my mind about the book, made me respect it more for going its own way.
Would I choose it for my book club? Okay, in the end I think it’s not quite satisfying enough for a book club.
I felt the same way reading his more famous novel, American Visa. In both works, the Bolivian atmosphere is what appeals, but Juan de Recacoechea has watched a few too many movies, and not digested exactly what makes those old devices work.
