Mario Vargas Llosa fails to capture me

After fighting every night to concentrate on “The Time of the Hero” by Mario Vargas Llosa, I realized that this book is just not intriguing enough for me.

In the past, I have been hooked on Vargas Llosa’s books dealing with themes like politics, incest, scandals and sex. Somehow, the story of students at a military academy in Miraflores, Peru, is not interesting enough. Yet again, I am one of those people who can’t put a book down until I am done reading the last sentence, so I have to get to the end of the book even if it takes me months.

For this reason, I decided to investigate the book a little bit more, but I couldn’t find any recent reviews since the book was published almost 40 years ago.

The New York Times has a review of the book on its archives, and it gives me a promise of rising action in the book– something to look forward to.

Some of the promises of the review are further criticism of the military institution, condemnation of society and juvenile delinquency.

Here is something I really look forward to:

During a field exercise employing live ammunition, on impulse Jaguar kills the weakling in his class. The school’s authorities carry out an investigation which turns into a whitewash, but another student is certain that he knows the killer. The student is aided by a young lieutenant on the faculty, but they find the system more than they can buck and are forced to withdraw their charges. The Jaguar has, of course, denied his guilt. Later, after he is beaten by a group of students not for his suspected act but because he was erroneously thought to have been the one who betrayed the students’ clandestine activities, the change begins in him.

Where I am now, the Jaguar is merely a rebellious student, but the promise of a killing makes reading the book worthwhile.

So I have decided to give Vargas Llosa a second chance. After all, he has never failed to capture my imagination and his writing style is so rich that the chance to read it is rewarding by itself.

Obsessed with Paris

Mario Vargas Llosa finished writing “The Time of the Hero” in Paris in 1961. At that point, he was obsessed with the quintessential Parisian writer, Jean Paul Sartre. Reading his first novel made me think of the last novel I read  of Vargas Llosa, which is also his most recent, “The Bad Girl.” It seems that 40 years later, Vargas Llosa is still obsessed with Paris.

When I read the novel, I had just returned from Paris and reminiscing the Carrefour d’Odeon was my own obsession. I missed Paris terribly and reading about a man obsessed with the city and a beautiful woman really kept my imagination going.

The New York Times review of the book sums up some of my thoughts about “The Bad Girl:”

In each case, the author revisits the time and geography of his own youth in a work poised, minutely balanced, between the psychic and corporeal lives of its characters.

Also, Vargas Llosa seems very inclined to remember his youth in the district of Miraflores in Lima, Peru. In both novels, his first one and his latest one, he starts in the district where he spent his formative years. It seems that he likes to revisit certain places on his books and that everything has a point of origin on his homeland, as it is the case with many other Latin American writers.

But coming back to Paris, in “The Bad Girl” the protagonist, Ricardo, achieves all of his goals in Paris by the age of 25, and he becomes a translators for the UNESCO. The New York Times review also makes an interesting point about Ricardo’s place in time:

Paris of the 1960s, the culture in which Vargas Llosa came of intellectual age, witnessed the popularization of existential philosophy, and Ricardo judges himself not only deracinated, a perpetual foreigner, but also lacking in substance. He’s trapped in the moment of translating one person’s language into another’s, “of being present without being present, of existing but not existing.”

The fabric holding everything together in the book is Lily, the bad girl, who he met in his childhood in Miraflores.  In any case, I love that Vargas Llosa captures my attention by not shifting so far away from his origins during his more than 40 years as a novelist.

Inspiration for a new generation of writers

Rafael Trujillo, the former dictator of the Dominican Republic, was the source of inspiration for Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Feast of the Goat.” Nowadays, a new generation of writers is being inspired by deranged leaders and history will soon judge their actions.

Vargas Llosa seems to agree and said so in a story published in the Guardian. In the story, Vargas Llosa argues complains about the governments of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, saying that soon there will be a generation of writers documenting their actions. He said that their governments are:

“like a broken record that repeats the same concepts, the same clichés and phobias, the same politics”.

He also said that he is more supportive of the approaches of other leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Michelle Bachelet in Brazil and Chile respectively because they practice what he calls in the Guardian story a “democratic left.”

However, two things mentioned in the story left me wondering about the future of Latin American politics and the future of its leaders. First, this story made me think about the destiny of Latin America without much meddling of the United States, which has changed from Vargas Llosa’s youth due to the focus of the state department in Iraq, the Middle East and the rise of China. And second, what really made me look into the future was what Vargas Llosa had to say about the future generations of writers. He said that leaders like Chavez and Morales are sure to inspire the new generations to write novels about their lives, and that the current leaders will have to wait on history to judge them through literature. Vargas Llosa concluded:

“The book about Chavez will come at some point,” he says. “Just give the Venezuelans time to assimilate him.”

A disappointing trip to the library

I was really looking forward to check out “Malinche” by Laura Esquivel yesterday, so I went to the Smathers Library Latin American Collection to check if they have the book. When I got there, I was very happy when I found it, but when I finally found the book I opened the front page to read the first sentence of the book, as I always do, and found out that they only had it in English.

At that point, I really thought how great it would be to live in a bigger city or one where Spanish is a more predominant language. The ideal scenario would be to live in Washington D.C. where I could just go to the Library of Congress that is celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month from Sep. 15 to Oct. 15.

Also, during this time, there are also many events celebrating Hispanic heritage. It would be great to go see the film “In the Time of the Butterflies” this Saturday instead of watching football, but then again, I don’t live in Washington D.C. and Gainesville is not as Spanish literature friendly.

Fortunately, the Smathers Library has about 450,000 volumes and I had no problem finding a good alternative. As usual, one of the books by Mario Vargas Llosa called me from the shelf and one of my good friends had recommended it. So now I’m reading “La Ciudad y Los Perros,” or “The Time of the Hero.” I think is really odd that I went to the library with the purpose of checking out a book about a traitor to the Aztecs, Malinche, and got out with a books about a boy in a military academy in Lima, Perú. That is just the way Spanish Literarure crawls on me.

Mysterious disappearances

In the midst of the political turmoil in Bolivia, I remembered the story of other disappearances that intertwine the political history of Latin America and seem to be recurrent through many countries. Right now, 30 people have died in Bolivia during the recent wave of violence and 100 people are missing. All this deaths and disappearances surfaced after President Evo Morales decided to hold a referendum on a new constitution in December and members of the opposition protested.

The news really make me wonder if the numbers are somehow embellished by Morales’ government and if the situation is worse than what it appears. In the past, the worst human right violations always surface after leaders no longer have power. This situation is definitively a reason to worry, especially because Morales is trying to change the constitution. Is it possible that all the Morales’ allegations of the U.S. backing up the opposition are hiding something worse? Is he covering up for something else?

Somehow, these mysterious disappearances during certain dictatorial regimes seem to be also a recurrent theme for Latin American authors.

Of the many books about dictatorial regimes, the one that really comes to my mind is “The Feast of the Goat” by Mario Vargas Llosa. (However, I really feel the need to clarify that Evo Morales is not a dictator, for he was elected by majority vote in 2005.)

The novel tells the story of the conspiracy to kill Rafael Trujillo, a dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.  “The Feast of the Goat” also follows four of the conspirators involved in the assassination of Trujillo and their motives to kill the dictator. The novel describes how many of the members of Trujillo’s party had to prove their loyalty to the dictator in violent ways.

Violence seemed to be the way in which Trujillo exercised his power, and I fear that it is the same way for many leaders today. After reading the news from Bolivia, I am really wondering. Have Latin Americans failed to learn from the mistakes of the past? I really hope not.