A kind person in the Q&A asked which books by the great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa I would recommend.
I have waited for years for an opportunity to scream into the void that everybody should immediately read The War of the End of the World (1981).
It’s a story about modernity’s war on religious faith and the horrors that the rejection of religion by modern society brings. It’s about how attempts at religious faith can be lost in the depths of human hubris and how the machinery of the modern state is terrified of any religious feeling.
This novel is very dark and quite different from the rest of Vargas Llosa’s writing that normally has a lot of humor to it.
I don’t recommend anything Vargas Llosa wrote after The Feast of the Goat (2000). I read all of that, and none of it is good. His gift abandoned the author in the last 20 years of his life. But almost everything before that is wonderful. If you want something really crazy hardcore Latin American postmodern, read The Green House (1965). That’s my second favorite by Vargas Llosa.
For an easier, more enjoyable read, go with The Feast of the Goat. When I say “enjoyable,” I mean, of course, to the extent that reading about an endless succession of Latin American atrocities can be enjoyable.
Leave a Reply