Vargas Llosa, Mario "The Feast of the Goat"

2000

(Spanish title: La fiesta del chivo)

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read



This was one of the toughest books I ever read. The descriptions of the torture are quite vivid and detailed. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who has a weak heart.

Rafael Trujillo was the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Of course, I had heard about the dictatorship and recently read "In the Time of the Butterflies" by Julia Alvarez, so I should have been forewarned enough. But I wasn't. The way, this dictator ruined almost everybody's life and what people can do to other human beings, it's just unbelievable.

The story is told by Trujillo himself, by Urania Cabral who is the daughter of one of his followers, and by his assassinators taking turns and making the story even more suspenseful than it is already. We see the different points of view - not that it makes us understand the dictator any better, I wouldn't want to anyway. Supposedly, he loved his country and its people but how can you treat someone like that if you love them.

It is unbelievable how the author managed to put this remarkable story on paper, I guess you have to be a Nobel Prize winning writer for that.

Comment from one of our book club members.
"This book provides wonderful insights into Rafael Trujillo, once dictator of the Dominican Republic. The reader can see his strength, his discipline, his idealism and the corruption of all that into a hideous corrosive force degrading himself, his collaborators and the innocent alike. The writing and storytelling are compelling. This is the best book I have read in a long time."

She is right. Unfortunately, her description fits many dictators.

Another comment:
"Reading the book started out quite slow for me, because of the different time and point of view changes, but after about half the book I could not put it down again until I finished it. It was really horrifying and revealing about history and places I had no idea about. And I dont understand at all how people can be so evil, cruel, manipulative. I absolutely also can recommend this book!"

I totally agree. It is unbelievable what people can do to each other.

"One of the most valuable things about this superb piece of literature is that it gives us a close-up, vivid, and personal view, partly factual and partly imagined, of the perpetrators of gross injustice so we can begin to understand how people can be so evil, cruel and manipulative. It worked for me."

We read this in our international online book club in August 2022.

Book Description:

"Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million people. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become the way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping away. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' ('Bookforum'), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit."

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 1996.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Vargas Llosa, Mario "The Storyteller"

(Spanish: El Hablador) - 1987



Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

When that Nobel Prize winner for Literature was announced, I was quite excited because I had read a book by him recently. A young man leaves Western civilization and lives among the Machiguenga Indians in the jungle of Peru. He becomes their storyteller, a person who passes on their culture's history and belief. The author has a very unique style, quite different from anything I know, the story is both mystical and mythical. A highly interesting novel. I definitely wanted to read more of this interesting author and added "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" to my list of books recently. Just as fascinating.



From the back cover:

"At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man...that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas's transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both."

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 1996.


Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

(Spanish Title: La tía Julia y el escribidor) - 1977

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

After having read "The Storyteller" by this fascinating author, I had to look for more of his books. In this novel which is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's life, at the age of 18, he meets a sister of his aunt who is 14 years his senior and falls in love with her. At the same time, he works for a Peruvian radio station where a Bolivian scriptwriter adds a lot of excitement to everyone's life.

While telling his own story, he manages to insert quite a few of the novelas the scriptwriter has produced. The book is both funny as well as exciting, a very interesting view on the life of an author. Apparently, Julia Urquidi (Aunt Julia) wrote her own story later "Lo que Varguitas no dijo" (What little Vargas didn't say). Sounds quite interesting, too.

Anyway, I loved this book, great read.

In 1990, a film was made based on this book. The title "Tune in tomorrow" sounds like a very good one.

From the back cover:
"Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.

The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.

Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review."


Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 1996.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on "Let's Read". 

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Reviewed by Gillian Valladares Castellino

I first became aware of Mario Vargas Llosa's book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter when going through Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Later that year (2010), Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I bought some of his books. They remained unopened on one of our bookshelves until earlier this year, when a chance item on my news feed piqued my interest. Mr Llosa had apparently blasted the New York Times for publishing what he described as "slanderous and perfidious" gossip culled from The Daily Mail. A quick trawl through Wikipedia revealed that his book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was based partially on actual events in his own life.

Out came the book, which proved to a wickedly funny account, rich with "effervescent rhetoric" (to quote one of Llosa's own phrases) - of events that transpired in the 1950s when a certain young Peruvian journalist (who was then only 18-years-old) fell head-over-heels in love with his aunt (by marriage), Julia. This was scandalous for the times as Julia was fourteen years his senior and a divorcee.  The book traces the trajectory of their courtship and subsequent marriage and the outrage it provoked within their extended family in Lima. Llosa had dedicated the book to Julia Urquidi Illanes who had been his first wife, whom he married against a backdrop of facts which were remarkably similar to those played out in the book. Where did fact end and fiction begin?

Told with sly wit and a mega-dose of disarming honesty, the book sketches the personalities and reactions of each friend and family member who was impacted by the relationship.  Though an irreverent, comic, rollicking read, its appeal begins to crumble when you realize that it is not merely a work of fiction, but in many ways an expose of  the lives of real people and many of these stories were not handled sympathetically. That said, Llosa's honesty and courage as a writer allows an apparently untrammeled look into the mind, heart and libido of a very typical eighteen-year-old male who was totally oblivious to the reverberations his actions would have on his own life and those of the other main characters in this dramatic episode.

Clearly, even though the book was first published some decades after the actual events, in 1977, the real Julia, who died in 2010, was deeply hurt by its content and retorted with a book of her own What little Vargas forgot to write (also titled My Life with Mario Vargas Llosa), which gave her version of the story. Some reviewers have dismissed it as a diatribe against the Nobel Laureate.

Julia Urquidi's book identified the other main protagonist  in the book - the scriptwriter. Running in parallel with the main narrative (the romance), is the story (and the 'scripts') of the Bolivian scriptwriter Pedro Comacho. According to Urquidi, the character was based on a real Bolivian writer - Raul Salmon. That was an inflammatory assertion, because though there was some overlap between the characters - Salmon had been a very successful radio serial writer around the same time that Llosa had been news editor of Radio Panamericana, his resemblance to Pedro Camacho ended there. Pedro was depicted as an eccentric, a person who, though he produced a prodigious quantity of work, never read. The only English language material available on Raul Salmon, written by Don Moore in The Journal of the North American Shortwave Association and claimed that Salmon, who died in 1990, had been the owner and manager of Radio Neuva America (one of Bolivia's largest radio stations), he was also the former mayor of La Paz, a one-time student of political science at George Washington University in the US and had worked briefly in London, for the BBC.  

Salmon was reported to have taken umbrage at the suggestion that the character of Pedro Camacho was modeled on him. Understandably so. Camacho was portrayed as an eccentric maladaptive character whose radio serials won him a large loyal audience addicted to the florid, imaginative mish-mash of Peruvian life which he dished out virtually continuously. Camacho himself physically assumed the roles he wrote about, wearing false mustaches, rabbinic beards, surgeons caps, even women's clothing as he channeled his characters into typewritten scripts. His themes included incest, marital deceit, mental breakdowns, deficient offspring, unconsummated love, the brutalizing effect of poverty and were a pageant of the different social types and classes in mid-twentieth century Peru. Overwork, resulted in a mental meltdown and his characters, their attributes and the serials within which they were originally contained, began to bleed into one another until his faithful listeners deserted him in droves and he wound up in an asylum and later as a faded impoverished "caricature of the caricature he had been". Because Llosa had based the main narrator's character loosely on his own and the other main character on Julia Urquidi, some readers began to assume that Pedro Comacho was a somewhat faithful representation of Raul Salmon and this borders on libelous.

Some reviewers suggest that the book can be viewed as Llosa's "homage" to the two people who shaped his artistic and personal life.  There are elements of sympathy and even empathy in his portrayal of Julia - sections of the book clearly show her generosity, clearheaded thinking and selflessness in small ways.  The squalor and tragicomedy of Camacho's circumstances are handled with compassion devoid of sentimentality. Notably, Salmon, on whom the character of Camacho was based, certainly did not have a squalid life.

All this "forensic rhetoric" aside, what can one come away with after reading Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter? I for one turned to the movie version of the book. Made in 1990, Tune in Tomorrow, starring Keanu Reeves as Mario, Barbara Herschey as Aunt Julia and Peter Falk as Pedro (whom Hollywood in its infinite wisdom renamed 'Pedro Carmichael' instead of 'Pedro Camacho'!!!) Let it suffice to say that despite the questions and qualms it raised, I preferred the book. Candid and entertaining, it provided the lingering sense of having been invited into the hearth and heart of a living breathing Peruvian family, who allowed their magnificence and failings to be on view. For wit and courage alone, salute!

Original Post at Healing Scribbles:
http://jillvc-artstuff.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/reviewing-aunt-julia-and-scriptwriter.html

The Storyteller by Mario Vargos Llosa

Reviewed by Gillian Valladares Castellino

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prizewinning novel, The Storyteller begins in the 1950s, in a small Florentine gallery, where a Peruvian writer (one of the two main narrators), chances upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the Amazonian jungle. On seeing the photograph he is gripped by the feeling that he knows this individual. More specifically, that the storyteller is his old college buddy Saul Zuratas. He begins to reminisce about the conversations he and Saul had as students, searching for clues that would corroborate his hunch. Saul's most distinguishing feature was a disfigurement - a massive, ugly birthmark that covered the right side of his face. As a consequence of it, he was nicknamed Mascarita (or Mask Face) and was exposed to a constant barrage of horror, revulsion, unkindness and even abuse from random strangers. He never seemed to mind any of it. That, coupled with the fact that he was raised by a devout Jewish father and had a Creole mother, set him apart from his peers.

On a field trip to the depths of the Amazonian jungle, with the Department of Ethnology (with which he was studying), he became acquainted with an indigenous tribe called the Machiguenga, a people for whom "God is air, water, food, a vital necessity, something without which life wouldn't be possible." The tribe holds a strange fascination for him. He debates the effects of modern civilization on them with his friend, insisting that "taking away their gods and replacing them with our own, an abstract God who's of no use to them at all in their daily life... is damaging." These realizations trigger a change in him which culminated in his turning his back on the modern world, eventually erasing his identity within it and transforming himself into 'El Hablador' (the storyteller) within the tribe.

The book traces the trajectory of this transformation, not just in terms of events, but in terms of insights that occurred to Saul as he interacted with the tribe. The interesting aspect of the book was how Llosa chose to delineate the process of change. There is a limited description of events to progress the plot, instead Llosa created a second narrator who is a kind of tribal being or consciousness embodied in a person called Tasurinchi who is a repository of tribal stories and folklore. His thought and speech patterns are very different from those of modern people. Interspersed between folklore, personal anecdotes and dream-like sequences of seemingly illogical thoughts and correspondences are insights and nuggets of truth and wisdom which modern man has "forgotten".

As the story develops, Tasurinchi morphs into Jehovah-Tasurinchi giving us the first clue that Saul is somehow involved with this "being". Jehovah-Tasurinchi, integrates into the narrative Saul's experiences of injustice, exile, alienation and difference and eventually becomes "El Hablador". Speaking of the process, he says, "I became a storyteller after being a listener. It happened without my willing it, little by little. Without even realizing it, I began to find my destiny... I discovered it myself." His acculturation into the tribe is complete.

In charting Saul's transformation, Llosa touches on a range of themes including globalization and its dis-empowering impact on indigenous populations, the pros, cons and practicalities of cultural hybridization and cultural nomad-ism. These threads weave their way through the narrative creating a rich tapestry of images and insights that demand a second or even a third reading to reveal their subtleties.

As he spends time with the Machiguenga, Saul intuitively develops an understanding of the wisdom inherent in primitive cultures, but this is not based on the 'noble savage' stereotype that so often underpins writing on these cultures. There is a certain lyricism in the way in which Llosa charts this: "Go on listening, carefully, respectfully... after a while the earth feels free to speak. It's the way it is in a trance, when everything and everyone speaks freely. The things you'd least expect speak.".... One and all have something to tell...Some things know their own story and the stories of other things, too; some know only their own. Whoever knows all the stories has wisdom, no doubt."

He simultaneously discerns a framework within which to make sense of the reactions he experienced because of his disfigurement or "otherness". There is poignant vulnerability in the phrases Llosa chooses to express this - "To look like a demon or a little devil and be only a man... must be both the work of evil and a misfortune and that's just what it is, I'd say... Only their outside is that of a monster, inside, they're still pure, no doubt about it..."

As he assimilates these thoughts, he begins to see parallels between the Amazonian nomadic tribe and the Jewish people - "Yet despite so many misfortunes, that people didn't disappear. In spite of its sufferings, it survived. It wasn't warlike, it never won wars, yet it's still here. It lived dispersed, its families scattered through the forests of the world , and yet it endured. Greater people, warriors, strong peoples, ... peoples who seemed indestructible, all went. Disappeared that is to say. No trace of them remained in the world, nobody remembered them.... Those survivors, however are still about. Journeying, coming and going, escaping, alive and walking. Down through time, and through all this wide world too."

Then his understanding evolves further and Saul is able to discern the psychology that underlies oppression - "Was it hated because it was different? Was that why, wherever it went, peoples would not accept it? Who knows? People don't like living with people who are different. They don't trust them, perhaps. Other customs, another way of speaking would frighten them, as though the world had suddenly become confused and dark. People would like everyone to be the same, would like others to forget their own customs... violate their own taboos and imitate theirs. If it had done that [targeted minorities] would have disappeared. Not one storyteller would have survived to tell their story."

Reflecting on all this, Saul comes to understand of the effects of forced acculturation and why he rejects it. - " I used to think: A people must change. Adopt the customs, the taboos, the magic of strong peoples...It wasn't true... Who is purer or happier because he's renounced his destiny.... I ask you? Nobody. We'd best be what we are. The one who gives up fulfilling his own obligation so as to fulfill that of another will lose his soul... It may be that when a person loses his soul the most repulsive beings, the most harmful predators, come and make their lair in the empty body..." In grasping all this, Saul realizes what his own deep needs are and why they matter to him. In fact, why they matter to us all.

Original Post at Healing Scribbles: http://jillvc-artstuff.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/thoughts-on-storyteller-by-mario-vargas.html

The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

In his biographical novel ‘The Way to Paradise’ the Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa displays the lives of the French trade unionist and early women’s rights activist Flora Tristán (7 April 1803 – 14 November 1844) and of her famous grand-son, the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903). The author highlights the common traits of their character as well as their search for the ideal and free life. When I first read the historical novel a few years ago, I was quite impressed by the double biography of those two outstanding and strong characters, so it seemed obvious to me to review it here. 

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, in March 1936. Already as a teenager he took to writing and worked as a freelance journalist for local newspapers. While studying law and literature at the National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, he began to pursue his literary ambitions more seriously. His first short stories were published. For two years Mario Vargas Llosa continued his studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, and moved on to Paris in 1960 where he started to write with more verve. His first novel, ‘The Time of the Hero’ (‘La ciudad y los perros’), came out in 1963 and was an immediate success. In 1966 ‘The Green House’ (‘La casa verde’) followed receiving even more acclaim and being considered the finest as well as the most important of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels up to the present day. During the following decades the prolific author brought out a new novel every three to four years along with non-fiction work. ‘The Way to Paradise’ (‘El paraíso en la otra esquina’ which in Spanish is the name of a children’s game, by the way) was first released in 2003. For his life’s work Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. 

‘The Way to Paradise’ starts in April 1844 in a room in Paris, France, when Flora Tristán awakes at four o’clock in the morning, the day when she travels to Auxerre where she’s expected to give a trade unionist speech. Memory takes her back to her childhood. As the illegitimate child of a rich Peruvian she grew up in Paris with her poor French mother whom she despised for her miserable existence and for giving her away to the first man who wanted to marry her, the owner of the graphics and lithography workshop where she had been an apprentice, a syphilitic and violent drunkard without any respect for women. Paul Gauguin’s story, too, is told mainly through flashbacks and streams of consciousness. The account begins in Mataiea, Marquesas Islands, in 1892, when the painter had already been living in the Pacific Islands for a couple of years. In the novel the lives of Flora Tristán and her famous grand-son are interweaved although in reality they never met as Flora Tristán died before her grand-son was born. Alternating their stories throughout the twenty-two chapters of the novel, Mario Vargas Llosa shows the parallels of their respective flight from the social conventions of their time. Flora Tristán left her husband and devoted her entire life to the fight for women’s rights, workers’ rights and socialism. Paul Gauguin gave up his comfortable existence and his family in France in order to be a painter who seeks inspiration not only abroad, but also in sexual excesses with often very young Polynesian women. Their longing for freedom implied that they both had to face many struggles and hardships along with failing health caused by syphilis. 

Overall ‘The Way to Paradise’ gives an interesting insight into the character of those two historical figures who themselves never arrived in paradise, but inspired others to follow their way and continue their strivings for an ideal life and society. I’m not in the position to judge the historical accuracy of the novel, to me it seems close enough to the facts, though, and it introduced me to Flora Tristán who I had never heard of before. The narrative is written in a style that can capture readers like me and that shows that the author was an experienced one who knew what he did. At any rate, I enjoyed reading the book very much although critics say that in this novel Mario Vargas Llosa didn’t show his usual genius. I can’t judge it since ‘The Way to Paradise’ is the only work of Mario Vargas Llosa that I know so far. Besides, there’s no accounting for tastes, is there?

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:
http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-way-to-paradise-by-mario-vargas.html

Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa

People are collapsed at the base of the monument and around them a dung heap of cigarette butts, peels and paper; on the corner people are storming the run-down buses that become lost in dust clouds as they head to the shantytowns; a policeman is arguing with a street vendor and the faces of both are hateful and discouraged and their voices seem to be curled by a hollow exasperation. - from Conversation in the Cathedral -

Conversation in the Cathedral by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa is set in Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odria. The primary character is a man named Santiago, who runs into a man from his past named Ambrosia and they re-connect. I didn’t get very far in this book, sadly. I read to page 63 before quitting in frustration. There were several reasons I did not finish this book:

• The writing is almost stream of consciousness and there are no quotation marks delineating when dialogue begins and ends. I found this very confusing as the characters move back and forth from speaking to “thinking” and I was never sure when actual speech was happening, not to mention who was actually speaking.
• There are many references to the political problems in Peru. Most are subtle, yet the plot seems to rely on the reader having some knowledge about the government and history of the country. I don’t have any knowledge of the time, place or historical references…and so I felt lost early on.
• There are numerous characters who seem to go by more than one name. Within 30 pages, I had no idea who was who and how they were related. I kept paging back, trying to see if I had missed something which could give me direction, but I was still a bit confused.
• Within 10 pages a dog is beaten to death at the animal pound. I am aware that this probably does go on in some countries…but the detailed description just made me ill and I was afraid there was going to be more of this kind of thing throughout the book.

The back of the book reads: “Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and oral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it.” I think the emphasis should be on the word “complicated.”

I really wanted to read this book because I have heard great things about Llosa. But, I am afraid this one was well over my head and thus felt like work rather than enjoyment. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind a book that makes me think…but this one just left me feeling like I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

Unrated.