Word: llosa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SENSE, Mario Vargas-Llosa's latest novel, The War at the End of the World, is a retelling of an old story. Ever since the Holy Grail was lost, men and women have forsaken everything for the sake of eternal salvation. But the temporal results are seldom beneficial. Usually the participants end up like they do here, dying violently with a prayer on their lips...
...hundreds who perished in the messianic rebellion which swept Northeastern Brazil in the last years of the 19th century have twice achieved some measure of immortality. First they were the subject of Luclides da Cunha's classic Os Sertaos. And now Mario Vargas-Llosa, one of Latin America's most original novelists, has turned his attention to this ill-fated band...
...Vargas-Llosa is successful in recreating for the reader both the small, desolate towns of the Seriao and the people who live in them. From the oligarchs of the coast to the poorest beggars of the interior all are portrayed skillfully. First we meet a collection of bad guys right out of The Magnificent Seven, who have given up their lives of pillage and rape to serve the Counselor. Then there are misfits of another sort, the town cripples and carnival freaks who are likewise "touched by the angel's wing" of the Counselor. Arrayed against this band...
...book, victims of their inability to see beyond their fanatic blinders. Ironically, the only fanatic who lives is the one who can see the least, the myopic reporter who covers the events in Canudos. Judging from the casualty list, the journalist's monomania is the one kind Vargas-Llosa approves...
LAST YEAR the Peruvian writer had a chance to play this part himself when he headed a commission investigating the deaths of eight newsmen. The journalists had died trying to make contact with the kind of fanatics Vargas-Llosa doesn't like, the violent Maoist guerrillas of Peru's "Shining Path" group. Like the nearsighted reporter, Vargas-Llosa view of the ideologically motivated rebels of Canudos and elsewhere is that they offer not redemption, but damnation to an earthly life of violence and suffering. All we can do is record the events and to pray that they don't happen...