The time of the hero [Import] [Hardcover]

Mario Vargas Llosa (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 409 pages
• Publisher: Rapp & Caroll (1967)
• ASIN: B0000CNLLI
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic - in a Vargas Llosa kind of way, August 7, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Time of the Hero: A Novel (Paperback)

I rate this book 10, because it embodies in one text a story so powerful from a personal and political point of view. The story deals with a group of army cadets in Lima, their pasts and their presents, and what will potentially be a future shaped for them by the serious injury of one of their troop while on army manouvers.
The story that unfolds from this, interwoven with the power struggle that goes on between the forces of good and humanity and evil faceless silence of the army leaves you breathless. Not everyone will appreciate this book, but there are those out there that owe it to themselves to read this book and learn. Not just about peruvians themselves, but the deep forces of power, ruthlessness and betrayal that power the human race itself

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coming of age in the military, October 24, 2005

By 

Ian Muldoon (Coffs Harbour, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Time of the Hero: A Novel (Paperback)

A novel which provides shifting perspectives and which moves back and forth in time and which moves easily from third to first person and in so doing manages to accumulate an engrossing look at adolescents and their experiences in the military. But it also manages to show the side of the officers in charge with intelligence and understanding. A major theme is the individual conscience in collision with the institution, and the individual faced with the imperatives of the group. The cadet training institution is a dumping ground for adolescents who are fed, clothed and "disciplined" and the novel examines their experiences especially ways in which they manage to create their own society within the structure much as in prisons. THe novel is especially strong in depicting the idealism of youth and their groping towards first love. Although cynical at times - rules are for subordinates not superiors one Lt is told (p382) it does end with an overall feeling of hope. A Mosaic of life in Peru in the 1950's which might be paralleled in many other cultures.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not my Favorite Novel by Vargas Llosa, but Interesting..., September 13, 2009

By 

Lauren Mitchell (United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Time of the Hero (Paperback)

I've now read several of Vargas Llosa's novels and I am a HUGE fan, actually, but this particular novel didn't strike me in quite the same way. It is an earlier novel than most of the others that I have read by him--this is a schoolboy/military academy novel that Vargas Llosa wrote during the Latin American Boom in Literature. Imagine "A Separate Peace" set in a Latin American Military Academy, in fact. (Except that it is also written in the less traditional, non-chronological narrative format favored by many of the Boom writers, who were all admirers of Modernists such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner.)

There really isn't any particular reason that I can pinpoint that I enjoyed it somewhat less than the other novels that I have read by Vargas Llosa--and I would recommend it to other readers. The way that the non-chronological narrative veils certain things about the story might frustrate some readers, but others might find that very element of the novel to be an intriguing selling point. Especially if you're interested in Vargas Llosa, the Latin American Boom, or Latin American literature in general, this is a must read, despite my own personal preference for some of his other novels.

(I would highly recommend "Death in the Andes," "The Storyteller" and "The Feast of the Goat," all by Vargas Llosa, as well as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)