The Dream of the Celt: A Novel [Hardcover]

Mario Vargas Llosa (Author), Edith Grossman (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: June 5, 2012

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 peoples around the world—especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon—but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and execution. Ultimately, the scandals surrounding Casement’s trial and eventual hanging tainted his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights work wasn’t fully reexamined until the 1960s.

 

In The Dream of the Celt, Mario Vargas Llosa, who has long been regarded as one of Latin America’s most vibrant, provocative, and necessary literary voices—a fact confirmed when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010—brings this complex character to life as no other writer can. A masterful work, sharply translated by Edith Grossman, The Dream of the Celt tackles a controversial man whose story has long been neglected, and, in so doing, pushes at the boundaries of the historical novel.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Mario Vargas Llosa:

 

“In the star-studded world of the Latin American novel, Mario Vargas Llosa is a supernova.” —Raymond Sokolov, The Wall Street Journal

 

“Vargas Llosa speaks in his own voice, sees through his own eyes. His vision is unique. His genius is unmistakable.” —Eugenia Thornton, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

 

“The bold, dynamic and endlessly productive imagination of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the writing giants of our time, is something truly to be admired . . . As with any great writer, [he] makes us see clearly what we have been looking at all the while but never noticed.” —Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

 

“Generous in friendship, unfailingly curious about the world at large, tireless in his quest to probe the nature of the human animal, [Vargas Llosa] is a model writer for our times.” —Marie Arana, The Washington Post

 

“[Vargas Llosa] is a worldly writer in the best sense of the word: intelligent, urbane, well-traveled, well-informed, cosmopolitan, free-thinking and free-speaking.” —Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

 

“Mario Vargas Llosa has long been a literary adventurer of the very first order . . . [He], I am convinced, can tell us stories about anything and make them dance to his inventive rhythms.” —Lisa Appignanesi, The Independent

About the Author

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Peru’s foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, and The Storyteller. He lives in London.

 

Edith Grossman has translated the works of the Nobel laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. One of the most important translators of Latin American fiction, her version of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is considered to be the finest translation of the Spanish masterpiece in the English language.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (June 5, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374143463
• ISBN-13: 978-0374143466
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #169,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A Great Story Drily Told June 7, 2012

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In the middle of this long book by Mario Vargas Llosa, there is a surprisingly moving chapter in which the prison official responsible for guarding Sir Roger Casement in prison puts aside his vindictively hostile attitude and speaks of the death of his only son in the Battle of Loos in the previous year, 1915. In English terms, he is speaking to a traitor under sentence of death, for Casement (since stripped of his knighthood) was captured in 1916 in Ireland after being set ashore by a German submarine to contact the leaders of the doomed Easter Rising against the British. Casement's life and death have passed into history, but the conversation with the sheriff is, I'm sure, made up. This is what a novelist can do: bring together different historical perspectives in an emotional human connection. All the more surprising, therefore, that Vargas Llosa dilutes the scene of the grieving man with Casement's self-absorbed musing on the details of what went wrong with his own mission, the parade of facts only slightly less dry by being couched as an inner monologue.

The 2010 Nobel Prize committee praised Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and for his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." So you would think the story of Roger Casement could not have been better suited for his pen. Born in Ireland in 1864, he worked in various places in Africa before being appointed a British consul. Joseph Conrad credited Casement with opening his eyes to the colonial exploitation that he would feature in his HEART OF DARKNESS of 1902. In 1903, Casement made his own journey upriver, returning to write a report on human rights atrocities that would make him a household name in Britain. In 1910-11, the government sent him to Peru (Llosa's own country) to investigate the even more horrifying atrocities perpetrated by the British-owned rubber company along the Putumayo River, the King knighting him for his efforts.

The author recounts all this in abundant detail, but in a rather dry biographical style. I found myself wanting footnotes to back up this or that assertion, but of course there are none. A novelist, though, should not need footnotes, since he can convince the reader of the inner logic of what happens through his window into the character's soul. Vargas Llosa certainly has the skill and imagination to do this, but for the most part he chooses to tell rather than to dramatize. The one aspect of Roger's inner life that he does illuminate consistently is his sexuality, putting forward his own ideas about the notorious Black Diaries that were leaked by the police to turn public opinion against Casement as a "pervert."

The most serious consequence of Mario Vargas Llosa's decision to tell rather than show is his failure to elucidate what to me is the most fascinating aspect of the whole story: Casement's switch of allegiance against the country that had showered him with honors. Despite the title, Casement was not a himself a Celt. He called Ireland (rightly) a "conquered country," but his own veins flowed with the blood of the conquerors. His parents were Anglo-Irish, his father an officer in the British army, and his religious affiliation Protestant. None of which takes away from his later commitment to the Nationalist cause; in fact it enhances it, since patriotism by conviction is inherently more interesting than patriotism by blood. But we have to SEE the process of conversion, and feel it in the quickening of our own heartbeat. We never do.

Llosa does make a case intellectually, by having Casement realize from his experiences on the Congo and the Putumayo that Ireland is a colonized country too. But those were abuses that he observed in detail and at first hand; with one small exception, we never see him in Ireland interacting with the ordinary people there. And the final section of the book, in which Casement makes the fatal decision to work with Germany against England, is so crammed with names and facts as to be almost unreadable without prior knowledge of the history; Roger's soul is barely to be seen. All in all, this is a great story that could have been a great novel. Alas, while the story remains, the novel is still-born.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Roger Casement's struggle, against slavery and within himself June 5, 2012

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition

After a distinguished career with many historical novels exploring the human toll taken by political idealism, Mario Vargas Llosa follows his 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature with the lightly fictionalized life of Sir Roger Casement. Familiar more to Irish nationalists for his anti-slavery activism and his execution for actions which were judged traitorous to the British crown which had knighted him for his services as consul, Casement's reputation since his 1916 death after the failed Easter Rising has suffered. Before his hanging in a London prison, British intelligence released his "Black Diaries," full of not the humanitarianism which fueled his career uncovering the victims of the African and Amazonian rubber trades, but the "gloomy aureole of homosexuality and pedophilia" still debated from these fevered diaries as true, exaggerated, or invented--planted, grafted, or organic within the secret soul and clandestine identity of a lonely, driven Anglo-Irish activist for justice.

Situated often in Vargas Llosa's native Peru, where the core of this novel burrows into the depredations of colonialism owned by Britain and controlled by Peruvians far from the control of their capital or the law, the placement of Casement within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century capitalism sharpens the author's portrayals of Latin Americans and Europeans complicit in raping the jungles, its women, and its resources. Vargas Llosa had run for president of his own struggling Third World nation; he shows a keen understanding of all sides in the debate over the fate of the "3 C's" of capitalism, colonialism, and Christianity.

Casement's early conversion-- from servant of the British Empire to at first its representative in uncovering human rights abuses and then its foe allied with the Reich as the Great War-- invited him to meddle in geopolitics where "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." His transformation nestles this dedicated campaigner within the globalizing struggles of a century ago which spiral (offstage, subtly, and persistently) forward from the 1880s to WWI. Casement prefigures, in his determination to discover the truth, our own guilty complicity with an unjust world's order demand for ever-lower prices, ever-wider markets, and ever-greedier enterprises.

This does not mean the novel's stuffed with set-pieces or talking heads. Substantial portions admittedly feel as if the print equivalent of a docudrama, full of staged re-enactments and voiceovers from letters and journals. While I was very familiar with the Irish content supporting this rather stolid narrative, Vargas Llosa takes a risk in conveying so much data in a rather unrelenting form of indirect first-person recollection to direct Casement's vast recall of names, dates, and events from his prison cell to us. The pace, ably and transparently translated by the skilled Edith Grossman, remains steady, no easy feat. Yet, less devoted readers may feel overwhelmed by the manner chosen to convey the information underlying Casement's missions over twenty years in the Congo, seven in Latin America, with another year in the Amazon and a year and more between rebel Ireland and wartime Germany.

The first section moves between Casement's last days in London and his upbringing in the North of Ireland in an Anglican family. Working for the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in Africa, Casement realizes the truth behind lies which gloss over the colonization and exploitation of the natives. As British consul, he rallies Europe against the Belgian Free State and inspires Joseph Conrad's exposé.

The Irishman's service for the King of England unsettles him; his Celtic background, stirred by his republican friends, rouses him against colonization closer to his own home. He tells his cousin: "In these jungles I've found not only the true face of Leopold II. I've also found my true self: the incorrigible Irishman." Casement reasons that "I've shed the skin of my mind and perhaps my soul."

However, Casement's diplomatic success exposes him to reprisals. He is stationed in Brazil, unhappily. Sir Edward Grey, the Crown's foreign minister, dubs Casement "a specialist in atrocities." Soon, the British-directed Peruvian Amazon Company draws him into another rubber-fueled "mythic cataclysm," as endured by the overwhelmed natives of another tropical realm. Beaten, enslaved, tortured, they suffer a similar fate.

Their stern taskmasters across the Atlantic "denied the obvious with the same boldness because all of them believed that harvesting rubber and making money was a Christian ideal that justified the worst atrocities against pagans who, of course, were always cannibals and killers of their own children." Casement, sent by the Crown, investigates conditions in Putumayo; his 1912 "Blue Book" on Amazonian malfeasance follows his successful African coverage. Revelations from the tropics of Peru precipitate the collapse of the Amazonian rubber industry--although the Western capitalists over in Asia rapidly find another opportunity for exploitation.

The intransigent and then insolvent Company--drawn deftly in its machinations--wants Casement's head, so he must flee Peru. In Washington D.C., he reflects on his sudden lurches from destitution to promotion. "Less than two weeks before he had been a poor devil threatened with death in a run-down hotel in Iquitos, and now, an Irishman who dreamed about the independence of Ireland, he was the embodiment of an official sent by the British Crown to persuade the president of the United States to help the Empire demand that the Peruvian government respond forcefully to the ignominy of Amazonia. Wasn't life an absurdity, a dramatic representation that suddenly turned into farce?"

Soon, arthritic and tired, the middle-aged Casement retires from the Foreign Service. Yet he cannot rest. The burgeoning Irish republican movement excites him, and he donates his wages once given for anti-slavery projects to the pro-Gaelic efforts against the Empire closer to his native land. Casement feels "castrated" by witnessing so much agony caused by native capitulation to imperialism. He determines to help the Irish cause, to ensure that his homeland does not succumb.

The close of the novel takes him to Germany, where he tries to recruit Irish prisoners taken after fighting for the British into a brigade "beside but not inside" the army of the Reich, to aid the German assault on Ireland which Casement is promised will come, given the upheaval of the war. When this invasion does not happen, Casement must rush back to try to stop the premature, doomed rebellion of his Dublin comrades at Easter 1916. His own Good Friday landing the other side of the Irish coast and his capture by the British serve as a sober denouement to his gamble to make history matter.

What is left behind in America, he learns only while facing execution for betraying the Crown, are his personal diaries. "A piece of negligence that the Empire would make very good use of and that for a long time would cloud the truth of his life, his political conduct, and even his death." Vargas Llosa sums up what may be Casement's erotic notations well; in an afterword the novelist reckons from his acumen that Casement "wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn't."

Vargas Llosa handles Casement's evocations of his moral struggles and the recollections of his sexual predicament with the same sensitivity. He conjures up sympathetic listeners in the priests who advise Casement over his decades of fighting injustice, and in Mr. Stacey, who turns from "fat jailer" to nuanced confidant in Casement's incarceration in Pentonville Jail. There, he is buried in unmarked dirt next to the path of the island's first imperialists, grim legions who marched up Roman Way and Caledonian Road through bear-infested forests two millennia ago. This concludes an epic novel via silent harbingers--recalling Heart of Darkness in its evocative framing story--of the British colonists in the footsteps of Stanley and Dr. Livingstone, among whom Casement's convoluted career began.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A devastating portrayal of colonial exploitation June 24, 2012

By Gene H. Bell Villada

Format:Hardcover

Vargas Llosa never ceases to surprise his readers. He takes on big subjects--Peru in the 1950s, the Canudos rebellion in Brazil, the Trujillo dictatorship, Gauguin in Tahiti--and brings them to life on the page. In this, his latest novel, he reconstructs and depicts the horrors of rubber exploitation, with all its human cost, early in the 20th century, first in the Belgian Congo, later in the Amazon (as seen and reported on by Irish natinalist Roger Casement).

What is amazing is that, for the last 20 years, Vargas Llosa has been a frank libertarian, a defender of the capitalist "free" market who openly ridicules the welfare state and who, in his opinion pieces for the general press, invokes the likes of Hayek, von Mises, and Milton Friedman as his model ideologues.

And yet, when dealing with something so stark as this dark history, the author puts aside the standard, formulaic praise of capitalism for "creating wealth" (a darling phrase of libertarians, including Vargas Llosa himself) and instead shows the system at its most violent and inhuman. We see here Gulag-style slave labor, though under the control of Brits, Belgians, and white Latin Americans.

THE DREAM OF THE CELT may not be one of Vargas Llosa's very best works, but it still demonstrates his masterful objectivity as a novelist, his gift for telling a gripping, suspenseful story, along with an ability to transcend his libertarian dogma and get at the central truth of the events themselves. The book is a worthy successor to Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, with which it will inevitably be compared.