Word: llosa
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...Spanish and Portuguese is Rabassa, 62, who has spent the past two decades bringing Latin American literature north to the U.S. The authors he has translated constitute a pantheon of Hispanic letters: Garcia Márquez (Colombia), Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), José Lezama Lima (Cuba), Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico), Vinicius de Moraes (Brazil...
Mario Vargas Llosa, 48, on the paradox of being a Latin American novelist: "Because you know how to read and write, you have an audience, you are respected-even by people who repress you and sometimes put you in prison or even kill you. In fact, if you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know...
...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...
This is a valuable message, especially for a continent which has seen more than its share of demagogues and false prophets. But Vargas-Llosa belabors the point. A good adventure story even one with as cogent a message as this one, shouldn't go on for 568 pages. Unlike the myopic reporter who is the novel's hero, the author sees too much. This is evident in the book's last third, where he gives what seems like a minute-by-minute account of the final battle for Canudos. In his previous novel, the brilliant Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter...