One of the major novelists in world literature over the last five decades, Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) is also one of Latin America's most engaging public intellectuals, a critic of art and culture, and a playwright of distinction. This Companion's chapters chart the development of Vargas Llosa's w[...]
A novel of guilt and innocence and the impossibility of justice in an unequal society. In Peru, an airman is found brutally murdered. Two policemen set out to investigate, but they do not even have a squad car and have to hitch a lift and cajole a cabdriver to take them to the scene of the crime.[...]
Under the rule of the unseen military dictator General Ordia, suspicion, paranoia and blackmail become realities of public and private life. Through the doors of the Cathedral, a bar and brothel in Lima, come the participants in this novel, including the central character Ambrosio.[...]
A powerful social satire which outraged the authorities of the author's native Peru, where 1000 copies were publicly burned.[...]
A controversial novel set in an isolated, run-down community in the Andes. Part detective story and part political allegory, it offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society, of the country's recent political violence, and of its cultural heritage.[...]
Don Rigoberto - insurance executive by day, pornographer and sexual enthusiast by night - misses his estranged second wife. As he compensates for her absence by filling notebooks with a steamy mix of memory and sexual fantasy, readers are drawn into his confusion between imagination and reality.[...]
Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Urania's own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafael Trujillo's reign. In 1961, Trujillo's decadent inner circle - which includes Urania's soon-to-be disgraced father - enjoy[...]
Ludwig Wittgenstein has captured the popular imagination as the modern Socrates, the fascinating master of enigmatic reasoning who, with his icy logic, convinced Bertrand Russell that there was a hippo in the room. He is an icon of modernism, but what did he really say?[...]
Flora, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty, and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. Paul, a struggling painter, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise [...]
Comic novel written with confidence and verve. Mario, 18-year-old law student and radio news-editor, falls scandalously for his Aunt Julia, the 32-year-old divorced wife of a cousin. The progressively lunatic story of this affair is interwoven with episodes from a series of radio soap-operas written[...]
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, where she claims to be from Chile but vanishes the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris as 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, an icy, remote lover wh[...]
It is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine.[...]
A subtle and enlightening 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 extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peopl[...]
As "The Dream of the Celt" opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past[...]
Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has overshadowed her whole life suddenly takes shape. Urania's own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafae[...]
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. This book offers an examination and indictment of this transformation.[...]
Felicito Yanaque has raised himself from poverty to ownership of a trucking business. His two sons work for him. He receives a threatening letter demanding protection money. The police don't take him seriously, Felicito refuses to pay up and gets sucked into a nightmare. He becomes a reluctant publi[...]
When a master novelist, essayist, and critic searches for the wellsprings of his own work, where does he turn? Mario Vargas Llosa - Peruvian writer, presidential contender, and public intellectual - answers this most personal question with elegant concision in this collection of essays. In "Four Cen[...]
It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and Tolstoy called it "the greatest of all novels." Yet today Victor Hugo's Les Misrables is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In The Temptation of the Impossible, one of the world's great novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa, h[...]
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 aro[...]
Awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 at the age of seventy-four, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has held pivotal roles in the evolution and revolutions of modern Latin American literature. Perhaps surprisingly, no complete history of Vargas Llosa's works, placed in biographical and historical context[...]