Rating: 
Summary: Stunning.
Review: This novels stunned me for these reasons:
Richness of cultural detail;
Excitment of narrative drive;
Inspiring, convincing writing;
Knowledge of the historical period;
Fascinating characters.
This is an epic creation; immensely rewarding to read.
Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: Powerful Story of Canudos
Review: Vargas Llosa's gripping 1981 book is a fictionalized history of Canudos, the community in the dry interior of Brazil that was utterly wiped out by the Brazilian army in 1897. Vargas Llosa's book is as long (over 500 pages) and as dense as the seminal Canudos book "Rebellion in the Backlands" by Euclides da Cunha, and those fascinated by the story will want to read both. This book takes da Cunha's as its point of departure, for where da Cunha was a military engineer who accompanied the military campaigns against Canudos and wrote about the event's impact on the Brazilian identity, Vargas Llosa is a novelist captivated by the human element. "The War of the End of the World" is the massive story of four successive military campaigns against a religious sect (part-Waco, part-Masada) that killed about 10,000 people on both sides. It is built on the lives of many key personalities. By threading together the life stories of several real Canudos inhabitants who included criminals, castoffs, and misfits with the lives of landowners, journalists, and military officers, including the famously brutal general Moreira Cesar, Vargas Llosa both chronicles the Canudos tale and creates a powerful human novel.Da Cunha was intrigued by the "why" of Canudos. What fostered a fanatical religious sect in Brazil's interior, allowed it thrive and grow, and why was it the subject of such national fear that the fourth campaign against the village involved fully half of the Brazilian army? Da Cunha spent dozens of pages writing about Antonio the Counselor, Canudos messianic leader. Vargas Llosa is less sympathetic to the military's point of view, depicting Canudos as a safe haven for those rejected by society, by sweethearts, employers, or the church. An island of broken toys. Vargas Llosa writes very little about Antonio himself, casting a reflected light by describing him mostly through the words and actions of his devoted followers. ("Death was more important to these people than life. They had lived in utter dereliction and their one ambition was to be given a decent burial".) Where da Cunha concludes that Canudos was a result of a failure by the Brazilian society and government to embrace all of its citizens -a conclusion that led to a reexamination of Brazil's national identity- Vargas Llosa is less sure. He raises a lot of explanations that have gone before (monarchist conspiracies, racial inferiority, lack of education, "something to do with religion", even a lunatic European communist who tries to make Canudos fit his notions of class warfare ) without settling firmly on any one. Finally, he concludes uneasily, "the explanation of Canudos lies in ignorance". This is a gripping novel, a powerful tale of warfare, an exploration of intriguing individuals who met in the atavistic isolation of Brazil's parched interior. A Latin American novel devoid of magic realism, for the story of Canudos is fantastical enough.
Rating: 
Summary: A tribute to Euclides da Cunha
Review: With this acclaimed book the celebrated Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa is paying a tribute to one of the most important Brazilian writers, Euclides da Cunha, who was war correspondent at the conflict's zone in the Northeastern state of Bahia, and who wrote the superb "Os Sertões" in the beginning of last century. The book from da Cunha got immediate accolades from critics and public alike, despite the intricacy of da Cunha's vocabulary. Vargas Llosa is said to be fascinated since he was a youth by da Cunha's report of the Brazilian regional intestine war that almost completely disrupted the newly born republican government, given the many battles its powerful army lost to a rag-tag counterpart of thousands homeless people, who obdurately followed a lunatic visionary called Antonio Conselheiro, who tried to revert Brazil to Imperial rule, dark ages style, and, after many years on the run, finally settled down with his poverty stricken retinue in the village of Canudos.
Almost 90 years after the end of the conflict who claimed thousands of lives in both sides, Vargas Llosa frequently visited the site and cities in the 80's, familiarizing himself with the geography of the place where it all happened, one of the most arid regions of the world, with less than 200 mm of yearly rainfall, to collect personal reports from the poor people who live there and who head the stories told by their ancestors who managed to survive that bloody civil war. Vargas Llosa managed to add a lot of interesting points to the central story by either inventing interesting characters which added weight to the novel: a mysterious English man who shuttle to and from the battle scene as a correspondent to a newspaper, or by portraying in the most faithful way the hard personalities of war commanders who thought from the very first time that war was to be over in a matter of days. Some of them would never return home, their headless bodies being exposed by insurgents throughout the road that led to Canudos.
One of the key points of Vargas Llosa's novel is that he adds also a lot of information as background to the conflict and to the book, portraying very acutely the hidden interests of a rural Brazilian aristocracy that had more to lose than to gain with the Republican government. Also of importance, the author writes a book as if he was born in the region, his style (purposefully) being pretty much akin to some famous modern Brazilian authors like, for instance, Jorge Amado.
|
