The Dancer Upstairs : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A well crafted novel of obsession, love, and fear.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Fiction or ideological standpoint?
Review: After reading this book, a question comes to my mind: can a writer (or just anyone) really fictionize about ideology? Where is the attachment that links the ideological with the fiction? Well, I think that the author makes his ideological standpoint quite clear. Through the fiction, through the analisis of the situation, he gives us his account of a REAL STORY. The book, well written, lacks of indepth on the complexity of Peruvian history of violence in the last two decades, and gives us an account of his standpoint (embodied by the policeman), which is in the end, biased and superficial. The fiction doesn?t hide the thougths, it hides the names and places, but the story is the same, and these people do exist, and their ideologies are far more complex than this book intends it to be.

Rating:
Summary: A good read...
Review: My book club read "The Dancer Upstairs" by Nick Shakespeare, and it was enjoyed by all. It tells a fictionalized account of the pursuit of the enigmatic leader of a Peruvian guerilla group. It vividly creates a world unnerved by the menace of political instability, and its varied effect on the citizenry. The main character, a police detective, and his wife represent this dichotomy: while the detective ardently pursues the guerilla leader, his wife is content to sell cosmetics and drive out of the way of bombed out streets.

Our one gripe with the book is that the plot hinges on two highly implausible coincidences. I won't give either away, but it didn't surprise me that the recent movie version did away with one of them.

All in all, a good read. The world is vividly depicted, the action brisk, and the resolution satisfactory. One note: if you buy the movie cover edition of the book, don't read the back copy. It gives one major twist away!

Rating:
Summary: A good read...
Review: My book club read "The Dancer Upstairs" by Nick Shakespeare, and it was enjoyed by all. It tells a fictionalized account of the pursuit of the enigmatic leader of a Peruvian guerilla group. It vividly creates a world unnerved by the menace of political instability, and its varied effect on the citizenry. The main character, a police detective, and his wife represent this dichotomy: while the detective ardently pursues the guerilla leader, his wife is content to sell cosmetics and drive out of the way of bombed out streets.

Our one gripe with the book is that the plot hinges on two highly implausible coincidences. I won't give either away, but it didn't surprise me that the recent movie version did away with one of them.

All in all, a good read. The world is vividly depicted, the action brisk, and the resolution satisfactory. One note: if you buy the movie cover edition of the book, don't read the back copy. It gives one major twist away!

Rating:
Summary: Intense Thriller about Peru
Review: Shakespeare has turned out a tense and frightening tale. "The Dancer Upstairs" is about the violent and ultra-radical Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) insurgency in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. The protagonist is Agustine Rejas, a policeman, who hunts down the guerilla leader, Ezequiel. Rejas reminded me of Arkady Renko, Martin Cruz Smith's Russian policeman in "Gorky Park" and other novels. He is an honest, decent, incorruptible man, whose virtues are little valued by the society of which he is a part.

Shakespeare tells a compelling story with literary flair and Reyes and the supporting cast, especially the guerilla Ezequiel, are strong, interesting characters. That is fortunate because the story is seriously marred. The author, for no good reason, relies heavily on several incredible coincidences to advance his story. Any hack detective story writer could have come up with a more inventive and believable way to tell his story than Shakespeare does. That being said, "The Dancer Upstairs" is still a cut above than the average political thriller. If you like Graham Greene or John Le Carre, you will probably like "The Dancer Upstairs."

Rating:
Summary: Brilliantly written with a fine eye for human nature.
Review: This book about revolutionaries in South America far transcends any cultural or geographical styles. The plot is intricate and diverse, the characters so alive you feel you are sitting with them, hanging on every word. Beyond the tragedies, are love stories filled with the small details that touch us.

Rating:
Summary: The dancer still remains a mystery
Review: This book, narrated trough the voice of the enquirer (the foreign correspondent) and the police man, reveals perhaps part of the story of a historical period of contemporary Peru. We hear the life of a police man, his houghts, his fears, his family routine, etc. We also are acquainted about how this foreign correspondent gets to this "dissident" of the peruvian police force, and the intricates of the organisation. But, besides the portraits of "insurgent young school girls of twelve years old" and "andean people full of hatred", we do not get further on the other side of this story. The dancer was downstairs, she was an instrument, some one whose hands were clean of blood, someone naive and idealistic, a beautiful girl coming from a good family. How about her inner world? The inner motif that lead her to assume that position? Was it only personal stories, or was it the history itself leading to violence, and more violence from all sides? Why only at last, the only attempt to reveal a bit about her is the talk with the ex-lover, and the former dance teacher? The policeman and the writer himself couldn't go on to her deeper psichyc and outline the complexity of how a modern dancer had come to choose this path, how this organisation succeded in attracting not only 12 or 13 year-olds...but became a national phenomenum? The book is leading and alienating, as if the only ones that had a life were the ones on the mainstream. The other complexity is left there unexplored, untouched. Would love to see the film, and to see that J. Malcovich works better at this aspect.

Rating:
Summary: A True-to-Life Serial Killer Saga
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A True-to-Life Serial Killer Saga
Review: 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.