Ethnographer goes Native in the AmazonPeruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature after a long and distinguished literary career, a career that still continues to this day. His novel The Storyteller (El Hablador) was first published in 1987.
A Peruvian writer walks into an art gallery in Florence, Italy. On display is an exhibition of photographs of an Indigenous community in the Amazon rain forest in Southern Peru. The writer recognizes a figure in one of the photographs, thus sparking a series of memories presented as flashbacks in the novel. When the author was younger, studying at San Marcos University in Lima, he befriended a classmate named Saúl Zuratas. Nicknamed “La Mascarita” because of a large birthmark occupying half of his face, Saúl was a misfit in Peru due to both his unusual physical appearance and his Jewish heritage. The two students meet in a class on the ethnology of the Indigenous Peruvian Indians. The writer seems to favor the government policies of gradually assimilating the Amazonian peoples into modern Peruvian society, thus preventing their extinction as agricultural and industrial “progress” encroaches upon their lands. Saúl, on the other hand, is adamant that the remaining Amazonian tribes should remain uncontacted and unspoiled, and allowed to live in the manner in which they have existed for thousands of years, no matter how strange and incongruent their customs may seem to modern Peruvians.
While the writer goes on to become a literary celebrity, Saúl devotes his life to his ethnological studies. He focuses his research on one tribe in particular, the Machiguenga. The Machiguenga communities recognize a figure called the Storyteller or Hablador, who is neither chieftain nor shaman. About this mysterious role little is known to the outside world, even among the most expert researchers in the field. Upon hearing of these Machiguenga Storytellers, the writer becomes fascinated by this vocation and its role in Indigenous culture and decides to investigate further. Although his friendship with Saúl ended years ago, the writer periodically comes across hints of his former classmate’s whereabouts and his work amongst the Machiguenga.
The perspective of the novel alternates between two narrators. Every other chapter is narrated by the author character, through which we get a view of academia and the intellectual sphere in modern Peruvian society. Alternate chapters, on the other hand, are presumably narrated by a Machiguenga Storyteller, who recites the myths and legends of his people. Of these two parallel threads, the academic narrative is the more successful in delivering a clear and compelling story, providing the reader with an understanding of life in Peru, and exploring the political issues around the Amazonian tribes’ place in the modern world. The Storyteller chapters provide a glimpse into the mindset of an Indigenous culture, but they feel more like departures from the novel than a part of it. While certainly interesting, if I really wanted to know the creation myths of the Machiguenga, I would rather read it in a nonfiction text on ethnography. Vargas Llosa’s literary voice renders such stories more poetic than coherent. Also complicating matters is the fact that the Storyteller indiscriminately applies the name Tasurinchi to almost any male character referred to in the third person.
If you’re reading Latin American literature, it’s likely because you’re looking for a reading experience that’s somehow different from the European literary tradition. Vargas Llosa certainly gives you that in The Storyteller. If you also want to learn about the reality of life in Peru, however, this novel is at times quite educational and at other times frustratingly confusing.
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The reign, fall, and aftermath of a Latin American dictatorMario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, is likely the most renowned and acclaimed author in contemporary Peruvian literature. His historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000, is set in the Dominican Republic. It examines the reign and fall of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who ruled over the Caribbean nation from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Vargas Llosa’s outstanding novel provides a realistic look inside the regime of one of the most brutal autocrats of the twentieth century.
In 1996, a Dominican American woman named Urania Cabral returns to her homeland for the first time in 35 years. She fled the island nation as a teenager and was raised in the United States, where she built a successful career for herself in New York City. Since her departure from the Dominican Republic so long ago, Urania has not spoken to her now aged father, a former high-ranking senator in the Trujillo administration, nor to any of her relatives. Now, seeing her father for the first time in over three decades brings to the surface anger and resentment for a wrong he inflicted on her all those years ago, the nature of which is initially concealed from the reader.
The story is not a strictly linear narrative but rather jumps around chronologically. In scenes of 1961 the reader sees both the Trujillo regime at the height of its power and the assassination that brought about its downfall. In between chapters on Urania and the Cabral family, Vargas Llosa examines in great detail the killing of the dictator and its aftermath, telling the story from the multiple perspectives of Trujillo’s enemies and allies. While the Cabral family is entirely fictitious, nearly all the other characters in the book, Trujillo included, are actual historic personages. The large ensemble cast comprise a complex web of corruption, oppression, and atrocity that illuminates in intricate detail the horrors of life under the unchecked power of a brutal autocrat.
What’s pleasantly surprising about The Feast of the Goat is that, for the work of a Nobel laureate, it is a remarkably accessible read. That’s not to say that Vargas Llosa has dumbed down the work in any way, only that he writes in engaging, articulate prose, free of gratuitous verbal ostentation, that emphasizes substance over style. This novel reads like a political thriller that might have been written by an author of bestselling potboilers were it not for the unflinchingly frank authenticity with which Vargas Llosa sets his scenes. While Trujillo is an infamous monster and Urania somewhat of a saint, the remaining cast of characters are painted in varying life-like shades of gray that blur the lines between heroes and villains, predators and prey. The plot includes a few very disturbing scenes of torture, execution, and rape that illustrate the violent excesses of authoritarian oppression in startling detail.
The Trujillo regime is just one example of what took place in many Latin American nations in the twentieth century, sometimes with the complicity of the United States. As a historical novel, The Feast of the Goat encapsulates that tragic era in South American history. It serves as a monument to all who suffered and died under the Trujillo regime and dictatorships like it. Though this novel may read like a political thriller, may it also stand as a cautionary tale of unbridled power.
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