Deep within the remote backlands of 19th century Brazil sits Canudos, a libertarian’s paradise. Home of prostitutes, bandits, and beggars, Canudos embodies the revolutionary spirit in its purest and most apocalyptic form. In one of his most brilliant and tragic novels, Mario Vargas Llosa creates an unforgettable tale of passion, idealism, adventure, and man’s struggle to be free. It is an exhaustively documented account of a historical event and a fundamental book in 20th century literature.
Description in Spanish:A finales del siglo XX, en las tierras paupérrimas del noreste de Brasil, el chispazo de las arengas del Consejero, personaje mesiánico y enigmático, prenderá la insurrección de los desheredados. En circunstancias extremas como aquéllas, la consecución de la dignidad vital sólo podrá venir de la exaltación religiosa - el convencimiento fanático de la elección divina de los marginados del mundo- y del quebranto radical de las reglas que rigen el mundo de los poderosos.
Así, grupos de miserables acudirán a la llamada de la revolución de Canudos, la cuidad donde se asentará esta comunidad de personajes que difícilmente desaparecerán de la imaginación del lector: el Beatito, el León de Natuba, María Quadrado..
Frente a todos ellos, una trama político- militar se articula para detener con toda su fuerza el movimiento que amenaza con expandirse.
In 1977, after the success of his best-selling novel La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Alfaguara, 2000, reprint), celebrated boom-generation Peruvian author Vargas Llosa began what is now recognized as his tour de force. Based on cataclysmic events in Brazil at the close of the 19th century, this epic historical novel tackles religious, political, and moral ideologies that seem even more relevant in today's rocky post-millennium climate. In Alfaguara's timely new edition of this classic, Vargas Llosa has added a prolog written in 2000. He wastes no time in acknowledging the essential influence of Euclides da Cunha's book Os Sertaos (The Arid Wastelands)Dbased on the 1897 war in Canudos, a small town in the arid northern expanses of Brazil. It was this story, a mixture of fact and fiction, that inspired Vargas Llosa to drop everything and go digging into dusty archives in Rio de Jainero, Salvador, and eventually the flaming hot deserts of the Brazilian state of Bah!a to write this tale about the frailties of mankind in the face of the apocalypse. The story centers around a mysterious, bearded Christ-like man who leads a wretched mass of freaks, prostitutes, beggars, and bandits to create a utopian state. Called the Counselor, he seduces them into rebuilding the decrepit sprawl of the sertaos (arid wastelands) in preparation for the end of the world. The national government in Rio eventually learns of the rebel town and sends in army after army in a chain of bloody confrontations that in many ways reflects the strife that continues to plague South America to the present day. Vargas Llosa started writing this masterpiece in 1977 while at Churchill College in Cambridge, England; then he went on to London and became so absorbed that he pursued the story to its source in Brazil. Finally, in 1980, he returned to the cool, serene library in Washington, D.C.'s Wilson Center to finish the last pages. Vargas Llosa seemed comforted to tie it up there, presumably inspired by how the violence of the Civil War came so close to the capital. In the last line of the prolog, he writes that, while there., "I was enveloped by flying falcons and in viewing distance of the balcony where Abraham Lincoln spoke to his Union soldiers at the brink of the Battle of Manassas." This historical novel, based on actual occurrences with plenty of fabulistic legends throughout, is delivered in Vargas Llosa's witty and objective journalistic tone. Vargas Llosa, who is so good at bringing to life the human faults of history's fanatics and dictators, succesfully manages to captivate the deranged world of the charismatic Counselor. Adriana Lopez, "Criticas" Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Language Notes
Text: Spanish
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Mass Market Paperback: 848 pages
Publisher: Suma de Letras; Spanish edition (April 1, 2003)
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936. In 1958 he earned a scholarship to study in Madrid, and later he lived in Paris. His first story collection, The Cubs and Other Stories, was published in 1959. Vargas Llosa's reputation grew with the publication in 1963 of The Time of the Hero, a controversial novel about the politics of his country. The Peruvian military burned a thousand copies of the book. He continued to live abroad until 1980, returning to Lima just before the restoration of democratic rule.
A man of politics as well as literature, Vargas Llosa served as president of PEN International from 1977 to 1979, and headed the government commission to investigate the massacre of eight journalists in the Peruvian Andes in 1983.
Vargas Llosa has produced critical studies of García Márquez, Flaubert, Sartre, and Camus, and has written extensively on the roots of contemporary fiction. For his own work, he has received virtually every important international literary award. Vargas Llosa's works include The Green House (1968) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1975), about which Suzanne Jill Levine for The New York Times Book Review said: "With an ambition worthy of such masters of the 19th-century novel as Balzac, Dickens and Galdós, but with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James . . . Mario Vargas Llosa has [created] one of the largest narrative efforts in contemporary Latin American letters." In 1982, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to broad critical acclaim. In 1984, FSG published the bestselling The War of the End of the World, winner of the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta was published in 1986. The Perpetual Orgy, Vargas Llosa's study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, appeared in the winter of 1986, and a mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, the year after. The Storyteller, a novel, was published to great acclaim in 1989. In 1990, FSG published In Praise of the Stepmother, also a bestseller. Of that novel, Dan Cryer wrote: "Mario Vargas Llosa is a writer of promethean authority, making outstanding fiction in whatever direction he turns" (Newsday).
In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of his native Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society. In 1996, Death in the Andes, Vargas Llosa's next novel, was published to wide acclaim. Making Waves, a collection of his literary and political essays, was published in 1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, a novel, was published in 1998; The Feast of the Goat, which sold more than 400,000 copies in Spanish-language, was published in English in 2001; The Language of Passion, his most recent collection of nonfiction essays on politics and culture, was published by FSG in June 2003. The Way to Paradise, a novel, was published in November 2003; The Bad Girl, a novel, was published in the U.S. by FSG in October, 2007. His most recent novel, El Sueño del Celta, will be published in 2011 or 2012. Two works of nonfiction are planned for the near future as well.
This is perhaps Vargas Llosa's best novel and a must for all those well-meaning readers in the developed world who eagerly idealize Latin American revolutions without knowing anything about these countries.
The book is based on the true story of Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel ("O Conselheiro"), a mad prophet of sorts -kind of a weird Christian ayatollah of the late XIX Century- who ignited, in the most remote corner of Brazil, a bloody uprising among the lowly against Money, Property, Progress, Law, Army, Republic and State, and everything else he found oppressive, sinful and evil.
Little by little, Vargas Llosa transforms this obscure anecdote into a monumental epic of Tolstoiesque proportions that not only hooks you on the plot but reveals the richly interwoven tapestry of Brazilian -and therefore Latin American- society; its illusions and delusions, its races and classes, its loves and hates, its fear of the modern and its contempt for the past, and the fanaticism that pervades both attitudes (to date).
I read this mammoth masterpiece during Christmass '94 at the midst of the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas, and it was sad to realize how little have we changed our societies. Our development always seems to engender inequality and our social struggles to defend backwardness and ignorance. Vargas Llosa is acutely aware of this, and he conveys it in his story splendidly, without preaching, without agendas, without aloofness and without letting you put down the book. Should you decide to read it, ask for a few days off!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
A través de esta novela Mario Vargas Llosa nos regala una historia real cubierta de fantasias tan bien entretejidas que facilita una lectura fluída que nos hace sostener la última expiración en cada capítulo siguiente esperando que no sea el último.
El personaje principal es El Consejero, un asceta que recorre todos los pueblos predicando la palabra de Dios y sin haberlo planificado se encuentra dentro de una multitud que veía en él al Santo Salvador que los dirigiría en la lucha contra El Mal. El Mal estaba personificado por los Republicanos que, según los seguidores del Buen Consejero, no eran más que El Anticristo que había bajado a la tierra disfrazado de humanos para transformar el mundo: Instaurarían el matrimonio civil, encargarían los cementerios a los municipios (en la época monárquica estaba a cargo de la iglesia católica), y someterían al pueblo a un nuevo tipo de gobierno, la República.
Es así que se origina la rebelión. El Consejero y sus seguidores golpean a unos soldados republicanos y huyen a un lugar desolado, apropiándose de esos terrenos, llamádo CANUDOS. En aquel lugar alejado del mundo -y también de la imaginación humana- forman una sociedad diferente, en la cual nadie tenía propiedades y no existían autoridades. Era una sociedad donde todo era de todos.
Sin embargo, y en replesalia contra aquella rebelión inicial, el Estado Brasileño envia un pelotón de hombres bien apertrechados que son rápidamente reducidos por los pobladores de Canudos al grito de "mueran los perros republicanos". Fueron tres las comisiones enviadas a disolver a aquellos rebeldes que "atentaban contra la seguridad del Brasil". Una tras otra son repelidas hasta que frente a un contingente bastante mayor al de ellos ceden y permiten el ingreso del ejercito republicano a Canudos. "No dejaron piedra sobre piedra". Los soldados se encargaron de desaparecer aquel pueblo que se resistía a ser sometido a las peticiones de la sociedad alienada. Un mundo aparentemente irreal que parecería una increíble invención y que, sin embargo, existió en Brasil a fines del siglo XIX. Un pueblo cuya aparente perfección no fue tolerada por un mundo sometido a la infelicidad y, por lo tanto fue condenada al peor de los castigos: a la desaparición.
Considero, por ahora -a falta de leer algunos libros anteriores y venideros de Vargas Llosa- como la mejor obra de este escritor peruano que ya merece ganar el Premio Nobel.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Esta es a mi gusto la obra cumbre de Mario Vargas Llosa, ya que una vez comenzando a leer el libro nunca sientes el momento exacto en que ya te envolvió y no puedes dejar de llorar, sufrir y reir con el libro.
La riqueza del lenguaje utilizado asemeja mucho al estarte pintando en el cuerpo lo ocurrido con los personajes.
Comes, masticas, digieres y te atragantas de cada párrafo. Una narrativa y estilo único, reflejo de vivencias drásticas y una genialidad envidiable te invitan a dejarte llevar por el autor a través de sus páginas.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
