Product Description

Deep within the remote backlands of 19th-century Brazil sits Canudosa libertarian paradise. Home of prostitutes, bandits, beggars, Canudos embodies the revolutionary spirit in its purest and most apocalyptic form. In one of his most brilliant and tragic novels, Mario Vargas Llosa creates an unforgettable tale of passion, idealism, adventure, and man's struggle to be free.

Blurb in Spanish:
A finales del siglo XIX, en las tierras paupérrimas del noreste del Brasil, el chispazo de las arengas del Consejero, personaje mesiánico y enigmático, prenderá la insurrección de los desheredados. En circunstancias extremas como aquellas, la consecución de la dignidad vital sólo podrá venir de la exaltación religiosa -el convencimiento fanático de la elección divina de los marginados del mundo- y el del quebranto radical de las reglas que rigen el mundo de los poderosos.

Así grupos de miserables acudirán a la llamada de la revolución de Canudos, la ciudad donde se asentará esta comunidad de personajes que difícilmente desaparecerán de la imaginación del lector: el Beatito, el León de Natuba, María Quadrado... Frente a todos ellos, una trama político-militar se articula para detener con toda su fuerza el movimiento que amenaza con expandirse.

La primera novela que Mario Vargas Llosa situó fuera del Perú es un prodigio de expresión de mentalidades profundas, de pasiones irracionales y desbocadas fuerzas sociales. Un relato exhaustivamente documentado, tanto a través de lecturas como de viajes sobre el terreno en que tuvo lugar este acontecimiento histórico. Un libro fundamental en la literatura del siglo XX.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #730157 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07
• Original language: Spanish
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 848 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1977, after the success of his best-selling novel La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Alfaguara, 2000, reprint), celebrated boom-generation Peruvian author Vargas Llosa began what is now recognized as his tour de force. Based on cataclysmic events in Brazil at the close of the 19th century, this epic historical novel tackles religious, political, and moral ideologies that seem even more relevant in today's rocky post-millennium climate. In Alfaguara's timely new edition of this classic, Vargas Llosa has added a prolog written in 2000. He wastes no time in acknowledging the essential influence of Euclides da Cunha's book Os Sertaos (The Arid Wastelands)Dbased on the 1897 war in Canudos, a small town in the arid northern expanses of Brazil. It was this story, a mixture of fact and fiction, that inspired Vargas Llosa to drop everything and go digging into dusty archives in Rio de Jainero, Salvador, and eventually the flaming hot deserts of the Brazilian state of Bah!a to write this tale about the frailties of mankind in the face of the apocalypse. The story centers around a mysterious, bearded Christ-like man who leads a wretched mass of freaks, prostitutes, beggars, and bandits to create a utopian state. Called the Counselor, he seduces them into rebuilding the decrepit sprawl of the sertaos (arid wastelands) in preparation for the end of the world. The national government in Rio eventually learns of the rebel town and sends in army after army in a chain of bloody confrontations that in many ways reflects the strife that continues to plague South America to the present day. Vargas Llosa started writing this masterpiece in 1977 while at Churchill College in Cambridge, England; then he went on to London and became so absorbed that he pursued the story to its source in Brazil. Finally, in 1980, he returned to the cool, serene library in Washington, D.C.'s Wilson Center to finish the last pages. Vargas Llosa seemed comforted to tie it up there, presumably inspired by how the violence of the Civil War came so close to the capital. In the last line of the prolog, he writes that, while there., "I was enveloped by flying falcons and in viewing distance of the balcony where Abraham Lincoln spoke to his Union soldiers at the brink of the Battle of Manassas." This historical novel, based on actual occurrences with plenty of fabulistic legends throughout, is delivered in Vargas Llosa's witty and objective journalistic tone. Vargas Llosa, who is so good at bringing to life the human faults of history's fanatics and dictators, succesfully manages to captivate the deranged world of the charismatic Counselor. Adriana Lopez, "Criticas"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.