The dream of the Celt - Mario Vargas Llosa

This book was published immediately after he was selected for the Nobel Prize in 2010. The anticipation and expectation were very high. More so, after the disappoint over the previous one- The Bad Girl. However, it took a couple of years before the English translation  to come out. In line with his later works ( those released in 21st Century) , Mario Vargas Llosa, takes up subject from history and historical figures and work his magic around those incidents. His earlier works such as 'The way to Paradise ( on Paul Gaguin) or 'The Feast of the Goat' ( on the dictator Rafael Trujillo of Dominican Republic) were very good, especially the feast of the goat. This time, he takes the case of Roger Casement , an IRISH revolutionary who spend his early days in Africa and later in Amazon fighting for the cause of the indigenous people against the abuse of colonial power.

Waiting for the hangman's rope in the Pentonville Prison in London, Roger Casement  ( "one of the great anti-colonial fighters and defenders of human rights and indigenous cultures of his time, and a sacrificed combatant for the emancipation of Ireland.” )  recounts his turbulent life spent across three continents. His appeal for clemency is under scrutiny by the Parliament, however the hope seems to be less, after the revelations of his sexual preference ( for the young dark boys of Africa and Amazon)  is made public by the authorities, obtained from his secret dairy. He seldom has visitors, most of his high profiled friends including some of the leading writers of the world abstain from meeting him or supporting him in public, for he is now under trial as a traitor of the kingdom, which once honoured him with Knighthood. Few visitors include an acquaintance in London and a Catholic Priest.

Roger's childhood is spend with his uncle and aunt after the death of his mother ( who continue to appear to him in his dreams) and later his father. Joined as an apprentice in a logistic firm, he get an opportunity to travel to Congo , which changes the course of his life.  Accompanying the great African explorer Stanley ( whom he recall as "one of the most unscrupulous villains the west had excreted on to the continent of Africa"), he had witnessed the atrocities of the colonial power Belgium inflicting upon the natives in their quest for 'black gold' rubber which is in great demand in the industrialised world. Its his investigation and report that opened the truth of the atrocities and cruelties that are subjected on the natives by the colonial powers.

On his return to England, he was entrusted with another challenge. This time to enquire about the activities of a British Company owned by Julio C Arana, in the Amazon jungles at Putamayo, Peru. To his dismay, the situation in Amazon is no better than what was in Congo. Those in power used all their cruel means to subdue and servile the native for their personal fortune. The levels of cruelty and abuse is no less and not surprisingly, those who were to take action were found in indulging the same atrocities, often paid by the business.

It is during these days in the jungle, that kindles Roger's patriotic believes. "Wasn't Ireland a colony too, Like the Congo ? Hadn't England invaded Ireland ? Hadn't they incorporated it into the empire by force, not consulting those who had been invaded and occupied, just as the Belgians did with the Congolese ?".  The rest of Casement life had been now focused towards Ireland.  Learning its history, its unique culture, and unsuccessfully trying to learn Gaelic, he started working with the Irish republican brotherhood and other similar organisations. His currently acquired fame made him the attraction and he was busy spreading the message across the country despite his physical illness in the form of arthritis. Raising funds for the organisation, trying to gather support of Germany ( enemy's enemy is our friend) to work along with the Irish Republican  Brotherhood in the event of an armed offensive, trying to secure arms and ammunition to the fighters, he worked round the clock for his dream. He was caught by the British Army, on his attempt to return to Ireland from Germany prior to the Easter Rising offensive, and was sentenced to death, by the court.

Written in three parts, each dedicated to Congo, Amazon and Ireland, Mario Vargas Llosa, does what he is best at. Weaving his narrative from the historical facts with his mastery and imagination, he build the case of Roger Casement. The cruelty and atrocities of the colonials ( chopping of penis and limbs, the whip marks on natives for smaller errors, the knife mark on the bodies with the company details etc), the plight of the soldiers who are asked to perform these atrocities by their superiors, the business houses with the eye for money and the personal preferences of Roger Casement,  etc are noted with keen observation and with detachment. Where history does not provide him with direct details, I think he excels himself. Where the available data is sufficient and with no scope of imagination, his writings are dull and plain as a text book., The part of Congo and Amazon are written brilliantly. However, the last part on Ireland does not live upto the previous two. However, he finishes in style.

Though this do not stand among his best books, it is better than the previous one.  Despite the uneven narrative towards the end, it still holds pretty well as a strong powerful tale. The narratives technique is brilliant often moving between the present ( 1916 at Pentonville Jail) to the respective continents. The ease of shifting of the narrative space is amazing. The language is fluid and poetic at many places. Again, not amongst his best,  good nonetheless.

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The Dream of the Celt ( 2010)

Mario Vargas Llosa  ( translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman 2012)

Faber & Faber

403 Pages
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Wiki Entry, Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Telegraph, Independent

Conversation in the Cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa

Month of November is for reading the newly crowned Nobel prize winner. Unlike the last couple of years, this time it wasn't some one new to me. Having read 10 odd books by Mario Vargas Llosa, I wasn't looking forward to a new revelation of an author. However, there is many of his books, I haven't put my hands on. That could be a lie, if I talk about this one. Having bought this in 1995 and started a couple of times, but never going beyond few pages ( I do not abandon books, but this book was an exception). The reason for putting it aside was not because it was not interesting or I do not like the writer, but was some stupid house moving etc. The announcement of Nobel Prize, thus became an inspiration to take this up again.

Written as conversation between two people on one afternoon in a local pub, this giant book of Mario Vargas Llosa, take us to the 50s of Peru under the dictatorship of Manuel Odria. Santiago, an editorial page journalist with La Cronica, goes in search of his missing dog on the insistence of his wife. The dog was forcefully taken from her by the dog catchers, who are paid by the authorities by the count of dogs. It was during this recovery of his dog, Santiago met with Ambrosio, an old time associate and driver of his politician cum Industrialist. Over the next few hours they discuss the period of the dictatorship and their life during those times over few bottles of beer at a shady pub known as the Cathedral.

Young Santiago, an idealistic young boy in his early twenties, move out of his house with differences with the family and their association with the power, leading a nomadic life there after. He gets into trouble with the authorities with his involvement with the Communists and APRISTAS ( members of APRA another rebel outfit who ruled Peru before Odria) and soon get disillusioned with politics, gets into the life of a journalist.. "My whole life spent doing things without believing, my whole life spent pretending""And my whole life is a lie, I don't believe in anything." His low paying job is just enough to make his ends meet , but he refuses to take any support from his super rich family.

Through Ambrosio's narrative, Santiago understand the complex and dangerous life his family is leading. At the high level of political circle, no one is safe. As he explains, his father has business interest than political. Having dependency on the Government orders for his business, he was suddenly left to nothing when these were suspended by fellow minister. The political quagmire and the unrest in the society lead to the elimination of many a powerful leaders changing the fortune of the family

This is a book on Power and Politics. This is not about dictatorship and cruelty, It examines the life of people closely associated with the power and however close you are to the power you are not any different from the people on the street. Every minister is corrupt, some of them run prostitute ring, they are low in morality and often spend evenings with their mistresses and wild parties. Political manipulations and repression is rampant and most of the close associates of the powerful men do the dual roles ( chauffeur as well as henchman ). To his surprise Santiago realise the involvement of his father in a murder and his unnatural sexual tendencies. Despite his trouble relationship with his family, especially his mother, his relationship with the father was always courteous and with respect. His father was always concerned about him, while respecting his decision to be independent, while the rest of the house consider him as a looser.

There is depth in every character and the interlink is strong and methodical. Be it the wife of Ambrosio, the cook in the family of Zavalitas or be it the mistress of the ministers. Llosa deploys a very complex structure of narrative. There are 3-4 conversations simultaneously, between different people at multiple places and different time period. Hence it is demanding on the reader. The book is long and fine printed. But this is very engaging, and never a dull moment. The secret or the story is revealed gradually and the build up is done phenomenally brilliant. Llosa's mastery in story telling is at the best. This book is considered by many as one of his best works.

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Conversation in the Cathedral ( 1969)
Mario Vargas Llosa ( translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa 1975 )

Faber and Faber

601 Pages
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Letters to a Young Novelist - Mario Vargas Llosa

Umberto Eco talks about the craft of writing novels in this short book. Written in the form of letters to an un-named disciple, he explains the nuances of writing the novel. This is not an analytical book, nor it looks at the literary genre 'novel' in any different light. Its a short book and the scope is limited. I find this an interesting book and can give us some insight on the craft of writing fiction. He uses the examples from the masters of fiction from medieval writers, to the superstars of 20t century to explain the points he is writing in his letters.

The rest of my writing will be in the form of study notes for my quick reference.

• 
  
  What is the origin of this early inclination, the source of the literary vocation, for inventing beings and stories? The answer, I think, is rebellion. I'm convinced that those who immerse themselves in the lucubration of lives different from their own demonstrate indirectly their rejection and criticism of life as it is, or the real world, and manifest their desire to substitute for it the creation of their imagination and dreams.
• All fictions are structures of fantasy and craft erected around certain acts, people, or circumstances that stand out in the writer's memory and stimulate his imagination, leading him to create a world so rich and various that sometimes it is impossible to recognize in it the autobiographical material that was its genesis and that is, in a way, the secret heart of all fiction, as well as its observe and antithesis.
• Writing novels is the equivalent of what professional strippers do when they take off their clothes and exhibit their naked bodies on stage. The novelist perform the same act in reverse. In constructing the novel, he goes through the motions of getting dressed, hiding the nudity in which he he began under heavy, multicolored articles of clothing conjured up out of his imagination. 
• The novelist does not choose his theme, he chosen by the them. He writes on certain subject because certain things have happened to him. In choise of a theme, the writer's freedom is relative, perhaps even non-existent.
• The separation of form and content is artificial; it never occurs in reality, since the story a novel tells is inseparable from the way it is sold. The way is what determines whether the tale is believable or not. 
• To equip a novel with power of persuasion, it is necessary to tell your story in such a way that it makes the most of every personal experience implicit in its plot and characters; at the same time, it must transmit to the reader an illusion of autonomy from the real world he inhabits. 
• Good novels - great ones- never actually seems to tell us anything; rather, they make us live in it and share in it by virtue of their persuasive powers.
• Style : Novels are made of words, which means that the way writer chooses and orders his language determines whether his stories possess or lack the power of persuasion.
• "Reading 'One hundred years of solitude' or Love in the Time of Cholera' we are overwhelmed by the certainty that only in these words, with the grace and rhythm, would these stories be believable, convincing, fascinating, moving; that separated from these words they would not have been able to enchant us as they have: his stories are the words in which they are told.
• For practical advise, I'll give you this: since you want to be a novelist and you cant be one without coherent and essential style, set out to find a style for yourself. Read constantly, because it is impossible to acquire a rich, full sense of language without reading plenty of good literature, and try as hard as you can, not to imitate they styles of the novelists you most admire and who first taught you to love literature....Imitate them in everything else; in their dedication, in their discipline, in their habits; if you feel it is right, make their convictions yours. But try to avoid the mechanical reproduction of the patterns and rhythms of their writing, since if you don't manage to develop a personal style that suits your subject matter, your stories will likely never achieve the power of persuasion that makes them come to life.
• Basic Structure of the novel consists of Narrator ,Space,Time ,Level of reality
• The narrator ( the person who tells te story) must not be confused with the author( the person who write the story). This is a vey serious error, made even by many novelists who, having decided to tell the story in first person and deliberately taking their own biographies as their subject matter, believe they are the narrator of their fictions.
• The narrator is always a made up character, a fictional being, just like all the other characters whose story he tells.
• The first problem the author must resolve is who will tell the story. There are many possibilities, but in general terms they can be classified into three: A narrator character , an omniscient narrator outside and separate from the story he tells, or an ambiguous narrator whose position is unclear.
•  If the narration is in the form of an I ( or we in some cases), the narrator is inside the narrative, interacting with the characters. If the narrator speaks from the third person singular, he is outside the narrative space. An omniscient narrator is modelled on an all-powerful God, since he sees everything.
• Time : There are tow kinds of time, chronological and psychological. The time in the novel is based on the psychological time.
• Time in all novel is, a formal creation, since in fiction the story unfolds in a way it never could in real life; at the same time, the passing of fictional time, or the relationship between the time of the narrator and what is being narrated, depends entirely on the story's being told from a particular temporal perspective.
• Qualitative Leaps : A shift is an alteration in any of the points of view.This may be spatial shift, temporal shift or shift in the level of reality.
• Given the existence of innumerable levels of reality, the possibility of shifts is correspondingly immense, and writers of all era have learned to exploit this very versatile resource.
• A narrative undergoes a similar transformation when a radical shift in the point of view in terms of reality occurs, constituting a qualitative leap.
• Chinese Boxes : Another technique of narrative is to construct the novel like those traditional puzzles with successively smaller and smaller identical parts nestled inside each other, sometimes dwindling to the infinitesimal. Eg: The thousand and one night ... 
• The Hidden Fact : The hidden Fact, or narration by Omission is another technique employed by many authors, It is vital that the narrator's silence be meaningful,that it have definite influence on the explicit part of the story,that it make itself felt as an absence, and that it kindle the curiosity , expectations and fantasies of the reader. According to Llosa, Hemingway was one of the strongest exponent of this technique, most of his best stories are full of significant silences.
• Communicating vessels :Two or more episodes that occur at different times, in different places, or on different levels of reality but are linked by the narrator so that their proximity or mingling causes them to modify each other, lending each, among other qualities, a different meaning, tone, or symbolic value than they might have possessed if they were narrated separately: these are communicating vessels.

This book, as I mentioned earlier has a treasure of references and explanations from the classics, most of them are very interesting. What impressed me most was the take on the famous one line story called "The Dinosaur" by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso. "When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there." This book is fun to read and fairly simple.However, as a parting note Llosa gives the best advice possible to his friend ( and readers ) :   

My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you've read in my letters about the structure of the novel, and just sit down and write. 

If you are an aspiring write, you will find this book useful.
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Letters to a Young Novelist ( 1997)

Mario Vargas Llosa ( translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer )

Picador

136 Pages

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Other Reviews: January Magazine, Complete Review

The BAD GIRL - Mario Vargas Llosa

Just finished reading "The BAD GIRL" of Mario Vargas Llosa. This book released end of last year is already making waves with some great reviews and recomendations.

Very nicely 'written' book about a Peruvian expatriate (Ricardo) living in Paris as translator , interpreter with UNESCO and his love affair with the BAD GIRL.

Lily came into his world as a 14 year old in his Miraflores neighborhood of Lima and he was smitten by her charm at the first instance. This lady follows ( he calls him the BADGIRL) him in his life and dreams ... from the disguised Chilean girl in his neighborhood, later as a revolutionary on her way to Cuba (whom he meets in Paris and helps her to get away to Cuba) , as the wife of a French Diplomat (Madam Arnaux) , as the wife of a English entrepreneur in London , the keep of a Japanese gangster in Tokyo, returning to him all broke and in disarray after every adventure before leaving him again. She is treated in Paris with his money and marries him later in order to obtain legal papers in France. She again leaves him to lead her preferred life before returning to him, sick and lost. While she is trying to disguise her origin and her background from him, he could not get over with his love for her. She like many , is after power, money , adventure, continue to leave him in search of these pleasures.

It is also about the dualities of life. The good boy and Bad girl , lust and indifferent, poverty and power , love and betrayal , countrymen and expatriates , domination and submission....

Llosa also discusses the falling living standards and the political and military commentary , through the letters and discussions of his uncle Ataulfo with Ricardo and the disappointment of the educated and qualified youth with the regime. Like all other work of this master story teller, the language and the style is good, but there is no meat. This book fails to give me any new insight. However, from a pure fiction point of view , it is very good and recommended.

I borrow the words from a review I read to summarise - " But for all its thoughtful tackling of complex themes, The Bad Girl is certainly not all seriousness; as the Washington Post declares, "Obviously, the novel was written for the sheer fun of it -"the fun for Vargas Llosa in writing it, the fun for us in reading it."
Many readers and reviewers have compared this to Madam Bovary, with possible influence from Flaubert. However, to me, this book evoked the memories of reading "Love in the Time of Cholera". May be for the perpetual wait for their love. Believe me, there are no comparison..

I always believed, that Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the writers who deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though not in the league of "Death in the Andes" or "War of the end of the World" , this book definitely contribute to the cause.

The BAD GIRL
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Translated by Edith Grossman
Faber &Faber
276 Pages
Rs 495

PS : I'm particularly fond of the beginning and end sentences of the fiction I read. Here is the last line of this book : "At least admit I've given you the subject for a novel. Haven't I , good boy ?"