Newspaper Article

Empire of the Andes Novelist Daniel Peters portrays the Incas' last days

Reviewed by Alan Cheuse, author of the novel "The Light Possessed."

1991

Overview

`The Incas\" is the third novel in Daniel Peters' vast and impressive trilogy about the glories and sorrows of princes and warriors and courtiers and stone carvers and magicians and just about everyone else who must have walked the earth at that time and place in antique America south of the Rio Grande. With its publication, the North American public now has the opportunity to complete its education into the lives of the three great civilizations-Aztec, Maya and Inca-that the conquering Spaniards covered over with churches built of the bricks of pyramids and washed with blood and mixed with semen. Like its companion volumes, \"The Luck of Huemac,\" which focused on the Aztecs, and \"Tikal,\" Peters' interpretive historical fiction on the turning point in the demise of Mayan culture, \"The Incas\" assumes that the seemingly unknowable is never out of reach. Peters' subjects are the stuff of the ethnologist and the historian you might think, before having read his fiction. Here, one has to assume that Peters is inventing as much he is as employing his research, because the psychology of the Inca family seems as much a matter for the novelist's speculations as for the historical anthropologist's monograph. But in one of those many credible turns of psyche-and story-that the writer of fiction has to master in order to bring any narrative to life, Peters makes us believe in the growing sense of personal difference that sets Cusi apart from his brethren, his parents and the political and religious order to which he by birth must aspire.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC