by Nicholas Shakespeare
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Product Description
The Peruvian guerilla leader Ezequiel is responsible for tens of thousands of fiendishly cruel murders, yet he consistently eludes capture. But in Agustn Rejas he has an indefatigable pursuer. From secluded city streets to the paths of a mountain village the policeman persists, tracking and anticipating Ezequiel's every move. Rejas' only reprieve is his love for his daughter's beautiful dance teacher--until he begins to pick up unmistakable signals that her circles--and Ezequiel's--intersect.
Based on the extraordinary manhunt for the leader of Peru's notorious guerilla organization, The Shining Path, The Dancer Upstairs is a story reminiscent of Graham Greene and John LeCarr--tense, intricate, and heartbreaking.
Amazon.com Review
Striding purposefully out into vintage Graham Greene and John le Carré territory, British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare tells a haunting, violent story about a military policeman from a country very much like Peru and his lifelong mission to track down an infamous rebel leader very much like the head of the Shining Path terrorist group. The tension builds slowly but beautifully, as a journalist in search of a story becomes instead an important player in the history of an embattled country.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Piggybacking on a tragedy, 2007-03-10
This reviewer finds the apparently widespread idea that this book may have anything to say about Peru during the Sendero insurgency frankly repulsive. Its overall tone is reminiscent of conversations among expats at the bar of some upscale Lima hotel, enlivened by the gossip of bored Peruvian wives. A more appropriate title could have been "Hannibal in Miraflores" or "Invasion of the Red Body Snatchers". It my appeal to readers who enjoy a mix of cheap terror and soap opera, sprinkled with reassuring stereotypes about South America, but it has literally nothing to do with the tragedy of Sendero and Peru. This is a passably written thriller, period. If you want insight into those times, look elsewhere, starting from Gorriti's book and Palmer's collection of essays.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A book of contrasts, 2006-07-09
This is a richly-detailed story of a detective hunting down a Peruvian terrorist (the Shining Path?), and his growing relationship with his daughter's dance teacher: two parallel stories that ultimately converge. This brilliant novel works on many levels simultaneously: as politics and psychology, as a thriller and a love story, as a contrast between the urban high fashion of the city and the indigenous traditions and poverty of the country. It is a tale that combines extreme violence with understated eroticism. It is a story that involves children before their time in the the cruelties of the adult world, a book in which politics is theater and art can bring terror as much as transcendance.
The central story is framed by another one involving an English journalist meeting the detective by chance in Brazil; I am not convinced by the value of this device, but that may only be because I first saw the movie, which omits it. The final chapters, which return to Brazil, are rather an anticlimax, though perhaps a necessary one. In any case, the scenes between the journalist and the exiled detective in a waterfront bar on the Amazon are painted with that acute sense of atmosphere that characterizes all the settings in Shakespeare's remarkable book.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Beautiful and Compelling, 2005-12-30
Typically I have little patience for white men's stories about indigenous cultures, or political commentaries disguised as dramatic fiction. Superficially, The Dancer Upstairs is both of the above -- a mixed-race man in a mixed-race society, continually confused and yearning for what he knows not, and others like him, none realizing that it is all the same, that no one has the answers, not even el presidente Ezequiel. And yet the book is neither of these two things, for it is, at its heart, a love story. The unknowability of the human heart. The inevitability of fate. Suffering. The liquid richness of time -- how certain moments contract into nothingness and yet others expand in our memories, on and on, until we are nothing but those memories, nothing but a physical relic of those vapors of time.
The book is beautiful -- the entirety of it thoughtful and graceful like a dance. South America's vibrance is channeled through each page, and particularly via the large brown eyes of Yolanda. In Rejas, the main narrator, we find compassion, sensitivity, and an overwhelming humanity. He lives as if on the fringes of his own life, continually making space for the desires of others -- his wife Sylvina who yearns for Miami, his daughter Laura who lives to dance -- until he meets Yolanda, Laura's dance teacher, who brings out within him desires that can never be put to rest again. The story ends in what I can only call a collision -- but a collision that the reader has foreseen, and anticipates, perhaps as absolution. And even after the story has long ended, I find myself wanting to retread the steps up to the narrow balcony of the Catina de Lua, and imagine that Rejas and Dyer are due to reappear at any minute, and that Rejas will begin anew, to murmur of his past, and that I will listen humbly, as we all do, when faced with a tale of great sacrifice.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A well crafted novel of obsession, love, and fear., 2003-12-10
A good book about a Peruvian guerrilla leader Ezequiel. He kills lots of people and always found a way to escape. A detective named Agustin Rejas is in pursuit and never gets tired. Agustin's only down fall is he is in love with his daughters dance teacher that is in some way connected with Ezequiel. Its a great suspensful book that is really interesting. The setting changes and the plot always connects later on in the book.Great book to read, not to long and easy to understand. There is important plots in the begining that connect with it others later in the book.Recommend to young readers if interested in a well develped easy to read books.
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A True-to-Life Serial Killer Saga, 2003-09-27
This engrossing novel is about the tragic intersection of the personal and the political in (extremely) violent times. Despite obvious similarities to recent events in Peru, the story is not about history and politics but about what it is to live, love, and pursue an ideal at such a time.The dancer upstairs is "El Presidente Ezekial," a would-be revolutionary based on the hapless Abimael Guzman, the Maoist president of the PCP (Partido Comunista del Peru) whose decade-long "revolutionary war" succeeded only in impoverishing an already poor country, undermining law and democracy in an already-authoritarian nation, empowering the already-powerful government security forces, and numbing an already-numb citizenry. In an unusual twist, the novel's protagonist is not the revolutionary but his nemesis, a disenchanted police colonel named Agustin Rejas. Rejas is an over-educated bourgeois struggling in a dysfunctional bureaucracy. He is simultaneously facing terrorism, pressure at work, a diminished income, and the demands of his would-be upwardly-mobile spouse. Politically alienated and socially isolated, Rejas represents the ordinary citizen trying to survive in an insane environment. Pitted against a violent utopian carving a path of blood through civil society, Rejas watches unhappily as state terror quickly responds to radical terror. The 'armed struggle' ends with the corrupt and incompetent government having survived the assault of an even more violent irrationalism, and what has been gained and what lost? Other reviewers have suggested that the narrative is fueled by coincidence, but this is not actually the case. It appears at first to Denys, the politically-connected journalist seeking a last scoop, that his meeting with Rejas is a coincidence, but in reality Rejas has sought out Denys for a reason. The other apparent coincidences, such as the dance teacher Yolanda and Rejas' photo of Ezekial, are undoubtedly intended to convey inevitabilities resulting from the intersection of Rejas' indigenous past and suburban present. A major sub-theme of the book is 'how much do we really understand about others,' and this is its major weakness. In fact all of the characters behave predictably; the putative exception being someone whom we are aware that Rejas scarcely knows. I found this 'twist' to be entirely predictable; even Rejas' final request of Dyers isn't exactly surprising. The characterization, however, is excellent and the story is well-plotted, but extremely gory.
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