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The Devil Is Real: Commentary on Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat
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22184 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 2002 |
2,516 Words |
| Author
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Alfred MacAdam
Alfred MacAdam is professor of Spanish at Barnard College,
Columbia University. He is a translator, most recently of
Alfredo Bryce Echenique's Tarzan's Tonsillitis (2001), and
edits Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a
publication of the Americas Society. |
Mario Vargas Llosa's long, dazzling career began auspiciously in 1963 with The Time of the Hero, a prizewinning autobiographical novel set in a military school in the heart of Lima. Since then, Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) has embarked on the methodical artistic conquest of his native Peru, setting his fictions in the Andes, the Amazonian jungles, and the northern and southern deserts. This geographical obsession has produced some of his finest work, including the long, complex The Green House (1965), a novel about failed ambitions and ideals whose setting extends from the arid city of Piura in northern Peru to the rubber-rich forests of the Mara–—n River area near Brazil, and the equally depressing political fantasy The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), set both in Lima and the remote Andes.
His personal territorial ambitions aside, there is, in the context of the modern Spanish-American novel, nothing strange in Vargas Llosa's fascination with Peru: his peers--writers who came to prominence during the sixties, such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garc¡a M rquez, and Manuel Puig--all write primarily about their own nations. Vargas Llosa embodies the old literary adage "Write about what you know." He writes about the Peru whose history he meticulously researched as a university student in Lima during the fifties, and he writes about himself within that nation.
What makes Vargas Llosa unique is his having carried out two literary forays into other Latin American nations. In both instances, he attempts to find the human dimensions of real social and political situations in order to translate them into his artificial, novelistic world. The first is The War of the End of the World (1981), which takes place in Brazil in 1886, when a horde of
... (1991 of 15483 Characters)
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