Customer Reviews

La Ciudad y los Perros

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

La Ciudad y los Perros

Es un libro recomendable porque aunque trata una realidad específica, cualquiera que haya estado en una escuela y con mayor razón en un internado puede fácilmente encontrar ecos de su propia adolescencia en la novela; amén de las descripciones vívidas, el dibujo de los personajes y los distintos momentos de crisis. Si no la han leído, los invito a leerla, al igual que las demás novelas de Mario Vargas Llosa.
Dr. Rafael Furlong De la Garza. ITESM CEM. México. 2007

The book is recommended because although a specific reality, anyone who has been in a school and a fortiori in an internship can easily find echoes of his own adolescence in the novel; Amen vivid descriptions, drawing characters and different times of crisis. If you have not read, I invite you to read, like other novels of Mario Vargas Llosa.

Mario Vargas LLosa is one of the best writers ever. I've read almost all his books and I never got disappointed. This is one of his first books and it is a very hard one. You should be prepared to learn about things you won't like to know. It was my first Vargas Llosa, I was 17 by then and he started to be known as an author. He deserves the Nobel Prize he won, they should have given him earlier.

I read this book in Spanish, which given the level of my Spanish comprehension and my disinclination to refer to a dictionary every 30 seconds means I skipped a lot of words, but I think I got a reasonable sense of the plot. (It's amazing how many words are superfluous.) This, the author's first major work, is a brilliant, detailed depiction of the lives of a group of cadets at a military boarding school in Lima. Part Lord of the Flies, part Catcher in the Rye, part murder mystery, it sheds a penetrating and often unflattering light on many aspects of Peruvian society: the military, machoism, female subjugation, violence, poverty, and the many social, racial, ethnic, and sexual disparities and inequities which I assume still exist, hopefully to a lesser extent than when this book was written. The story line is compelling and the main characters gripping. A brilliant tour-de-force by a Nobel Prize winning author. Five stars.

The book is very well written, of course, like all Mario Vargas Llosa's books. However, there are some pages I would have preferred not to read. One example is the boys' entertainment at night, and the other is the torture of the poor dog. (I'm a dog lover). The ending is very realistic - unfortunately, Latin American countries handle a situation like that in similar ways, and Peru is not the exception.

I tried twice to send this book to Merida, Mexico and it never got there. Fortunately I got a refund