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Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is s...)
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.
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At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happe...)
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.
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A painstakingly researched and lively novel about a neg...)
A painstakingly researched and lively novel about a neglected human rights pioneer by the Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa
In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world. But when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and execution. Ultimately, the scandals surrounding Casement's trial and eventual hanging marred his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights work wasn't fully reexamined until the 1960s. Dream of the Celt is a fascinating fictional account of an extraordinary man in the original and dynamic style of Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society
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In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness ...)
In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation?penned by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today.
Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot?whose essay Notes Toward a Definition of Culture is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished?Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.
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Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptines...)
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 l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. 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 a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. 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.
(The Time of the Hero has been acclaimed by critics around...)
The Time of the Hero has been acclaimed by critics around the world as one of the outstanding Spanish novels of recent decades. In the author's native Peru, this powerful social satire so outraged the authorities that a thousand copies were publicly burned. The novel is set in Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, where a group of cadets attempt to break out of the vicious round of sadistic ragging, military discipline, confinement and boredom. But their pranks set off a cycle of betrayal, murder and revenge which jeopardizes the entire military hierarchy. 'A work of undeniable power and skill.' Sunday Telegraph
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A New York Times Notable Book of 2007
"Splendid, suspe...)
A New York Times Notable Book of 2007
"Splendid, suspenseful, and irresistible . . . A contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s--and 70s and 80s."--The New York Times Book Review
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling, epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.
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A Haunting tale of power, corruption,
and the complex s...)
A Haunting tale of power, corruption,
and the complex search for identity
Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town.
Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis,
Conversation in The Cathedral is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation.
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In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared....)
In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tomás entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men.
Death in the Andes is an atmospheric suspense story and a political allegory, a panoramic view of contemporary Peru from one of the world's great novelists.
Mario Vargas Llosa was a Peruvian writer, novelist, critic, journalist, screenwriter, and essayist.
Background
Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa; the son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta. For the first 10 years of his life he lived in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with his mother and grandparents. He returned to Peru, however, in 1946 when his parents, who had divorced shortly before his birth, were reunited. The family settled in Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb.
Education
Vargas Llosa received his early education in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Fearful that his son was in danger of losing his virility because of his passion for writing, Vargas Llosa's father shipped him off to Leoncio Prado, an institution that the author described as half reform school and half college, run by fanatics of military discipline. He later attended the University of San Marcos in Lima to study law and literature.
On November 18, 2010, Vargas Llosa received the honorary degree Degree of Letters from the City College of New York of the City University of New York
Career
By the time he was 16 he was working part-time for several Lima tabloids, covering crime stories mainly. His first book, Los Jefes, a collection of short stories, was published in 1958 when he was 22. These years proved to be difficult for Vargas Llosa, however, since he and his father did not see eye to eye on Vargas Llosa's writing ambitions.
His first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), gained instant notoriety when Peruvian military leaders condemned it and burned one thousand copies in the courtyard of Leoncio Prado. Praised for its stylistic and innovative craftsmanship, the novel presented from multiple points of view a story of official corruption and cruelty in a military institution. It quickly established Vargas Llosa's reputation as social critic and writer. Vargas Llosa's next two novels were The Green House (1969), a magical realistic tale of an enchanted whorehouse, and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), a 601-page narrative of the moral depravity of life in Peru during the 1950s under dictator Manuel Odria. Both books provided further variations on his themes of hypocrisy and corruption in Peruvian society and politics. In 1973, however, Vargas Llosa's first humorous novel, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, was published. A black comedy about a naive army officer who diligently obeys his commanding officers' order to organize a corp of prostitutes to service soldiers in desolate jungle camps, the novel depicted with biting wit Vargas Llosa's continual disdain for military bureaucracy and incompetence. Four years later his most internationally popular - and most autobiographical-novel, Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter, appeared. A fictionalized version of his first marriage to his Aunt Julia, a woman ten years his senior, the novel traces the adventures of an 18-year-old character named Mario and the outlandish plots of his co-worker and friend, Pedro Camacho, a fanatical writer of soap operas who becomes increasing neurotic as he spins out daily his fantastic, convoluted tale of love, loss, and insanity. This device of multiple-level storytelling from the point of view of widely divergent characters is a Vargas Llosa hallmark, and most critics agree that the structures of his next two overtly political novels, War at the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), are shaped by it.
In 1986 Vargas Llosa turned his hand to detective fiction and wrote the fast-paced cops and killer thriller Who Killed Palomino Molera? Although the novel lacked the thickly layered narrative scope of his other works, it clearly proved Vargas Llosa's talents for writing sordid detail and earthy, comic dialogue.
His 1987 work The Storyteller returned again to the theme of tale-telling from multiple points of view. It relates the adventures of a nameless narrator who is fascinated by the almost mystical transformation of his college friend, Saul Zurantas, a Peruvian Jew and former student of ethnology, who leaves civilization to live and tell tales among the Machiguenga tribesmen in the depths of the Amazonian rain forests. The storyteller asks as he roams the jungle with the Machiguenga, people who must continually walk in order to fulfill their obligation to the gods and preserve the earth and the sky and the stars.
A haunting, deeply spiritual novel, The Storyteller is entirely different in scope and tone from Vargas Llosa's later work Elogio de la Madrastra (1988), an erotic tale of sexual tension between a stepmother and stepson, described by the author as a "diversion. " An English translation, In Praise of the Stepmother, was published in 1990. It was an erotic novel about a beautiful but naughty little boy.
The later novels are amazing works to come from the pen of a man who temporarily, at least, abandoned his isolation as a writer to pursue an active political career. This was to fulfill what he considered his obligations toward improving the moral, social, and economic quality of life in his country. In 1990 Vargas Llosa became the candidate for president of a center-right coalition called the Democratic Front (Fredemo). He was opposed by the candidate of the Change (Cambio) 90 Party, Alberto Fujimori. The well-known author took an early lead but gradually lost ground and in a run-off election was defeated by Fujimori. His book about the experience, Tale of a Sacrifical Llama, released in June, 1994, offers a convincing self-portrait of a political innocent sinking under a tide of democratic absurdities. This follows his work A Fish in the Water: A Memoir which detailed "his bittersweet look at the nearly three years he spent in public life. "
He became a citizen of Spain in 1993.
Vargas Llosa went back to his writing full-time after his brief affair with politics. His Lituma en los Andes is a story of political violence and social regression-laced with Dionysian overtones - in a contemporary Andean setting. Vargas Llosa's novel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997) marked the first time any publisher had released a title in all Spanish-language markets on the same day.
The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo), a political thriller, was published in 2000 (and in English in 2001). It is based on the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who governed the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. In 2003 he wrote The Way to Paradise in which he studies Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin. In 2006, Vargas Llosa wrote The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la nina mala).
He continues to write, both journalism and fiction, and to travel extensively. He has also taught as a visiting professor at a number of prominent universities.
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In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared....)
Religion
He is an atheist.
Politics
Over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards more right-wing liberalism. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with his policies.
Vargas Llosa is opposed to Catalan independence from Spain.
Views
Quotations:
"We were opposites; we did not respect each other. In Bolivia I wrote and my grandparents and mother hailed me for it. When my father discovered that I was a writer, he had the opposite reaction. The bourgeoisie of Lima then scorned literature-they considered it an alibi for idlers, an activity of the upper class. "
"I love Spain as much as Peru, and my debt to her is as great as my gratitude. If not for Spain, I never would have reached this podium or become a known writer".
Membership
In 1994 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Espanola (Royal Spanish Academy). Vargas Llosa joined the Mont Pelerin Society in 2014. He is also a member of Washington D. C. based think tank, the Inter-American Dialogue.
Connections
He married Julia Urquidi in 1955 at the age of 19; she was 10 years older. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1964. In 1965 Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children: Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a writer and editor; Gonzalo, an international civil servant; and Morgana, a photographer. As of 2015, he is in a relationship with Filipina Spanish socialite and TV personality Isabel Preysler and seeking a divorce from Patricia Llosa.