When Mario Vargas Llosa died a few months ago, I read several online tributes. Two people I follow wrote that while Vargas Llosa wrote several great books, none of them compare with this 1981 masterpiece. So I ordered a copy, which I just finished reading. It is indeed very fine.
The novel follows the strange but true tale of Belo Monte, a millenarian commune in northern Brazil. This part of Brazil had been devastated by a series of natural disasters, including a dire drought in 1878-1879 and a series of epidemics, that led to the complete abandonment of many plantations and even some small towns. Through that wrecked landscape a man came wandering: Antônio Conselheiro, known as The Counselor. The Counselor was an ascetic who dressed in rags and hardly ate, a sort of a prophet but also a defender of traditional Catholicism who revered priests and nuns. He preached against the new Brazilian Republic, secular marriage, the metric system, the census, and all other innovations, and he sometimes said that Jesus would soon return to purify the church and put a king back in charge. He gathered followers and for years they wandered the blighted region together, restoring churches, cleaning up graveyards, and listening to the Counselor's homilies. Eventually they settled down at a mostly abandoned place called Canudos. They built or rebuilt huts, planted fields, and began the construction of a large stone church. They called this place Belo Monte. The community grew until it held more than 5,000 houses. This peasant takeover of someone else's land led to an attack on Belo Monte by local militia, which was beaten off with heavy losses. The prospect of monarchist, traditionalist rebels defeating the militia while calling for destruction of the new Republic alarmed the authorities, and they launched a war against Belo Monte that went on until it was destroyed.
Learning what actually happened in Belo Monte is a hard problem. The sources were all written by outsiders after the war, and there is no particular reason to believe them. Enter Mario Vargas Llosa.
A serious scholar of Latin American history who had at various times been both a socialist revolutionary and a conservative politician, Vargas Llosa found in the tale of Canudos a perfect medium to express his vision of politics, war, and the human condition. Since we have no record of the people who joined the Counselor, and thus no clear idea of who they were and what they saw in him, Vargas Llosa simply imagined them. He gives us reformed bandits, ruined farmers, the surviving remnant of a wandering circus, a deformed cripple, a dwarf, people wracked by regret over obscure sins, an educated European who has been exiled because of his revolutionary activities, and more. They are fascinating in their brokenness, pathetic in their search for redemption, admirable in their determination to go on with life despite what they and their communities had endured. We see the Counselor only from the outside, so he remains mysterious to us, but we see how powerful his faith is to those who have lost everything else. Some of this exposition is very strange to read. But then Vargas Llosa was trying to cross the vast gulf between his own mind and those of hungry people who became the followers of a half-mad prophet, and surely that experience ought to be strange.
A politican himself, Vargas Llosa also lays out the political background to all of this, the factions maneuvering to bring back the empire, maintain the democratic republic, or install a military dictatorship. He shows us their public stands, their backroom meetings, the ways they manipulate the accounts printed in the newspapers they control. Canudos is a side issue to all of them, a wild card they try to play against each other, heedless of the broken lives of its inhabitants and their redemptive dreams. People will suffer and die, of course, but people always suffer and die.
Survivors of Canudos, 1897
This is a book about a war, so there is a lot of fighting. But Vargas Llosa is concerned less with what happened than with how people felt about it. He explores the minds Brazilian officers, regular soldiers, a young surgeon confronting the horror of his first battle, frightened rebels, civilians trapped in the storm of war. Some of the government soldiers have grave doubts about what they are doing; sent to put down a monarchist rebellion, they instead find sad, confused, poverty-stricken people who turned in desperation to a man who promised them divine consolation. Yet they are soldiers, so they carry out the mission they were sent to do.
To me the most impressive thing about the book is the vast breadth of Vargas Llosa's vision, and of his sympathies. He is equally at home in the private studies of rich planters and the huts of hungry laborers; he understands the appeal of both democratic reform and religious tradition; he can make both army officers and a crazy prophet seem heroic.
If you are tired of reading books by people who just don't seem to know much about the world, Vargas Llosa might be the writer for you. Because I have never read another novel by someone who seems to know so much, and who has tried so hard to understand so many different things.
5 comments:
The book has its virtues but it has some flaws as well. (In particular that long knife fight is ridiculous.) The other famous account (non-fiction) of the same events is Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões, translated as Rebellion in the Backlands. The whole episode seems like something out of the Middle Ages. My favorite Vargas Llosa novels are Conversation in the Cathedral (long, complex, and questionably translated into English by the usually reliable Gregory Rabassa) and his novel about Roger Casement, The Dream of the Celt.
I read the book years ago, and came away with a very different reaction: not an impression of an author of immense learning and broad human sympathy, but a fantasist shaping a complex historical event according to the stereotypes he carries around with him (the decadent aristocrat, the never-fully-alive revolutionary nerd, the poor, deluded "simple" people). Perhaps this reflects my own imagination, debased by too many years feeding on its own cynicism. Your way of reading it is certainly more appealing. On the other hand, my picture of MVL isn't too different from the one that emerged from the controversial report produced by a special commission he headed on the events at Uchuraccay (a group of reporters stoned to death by villagers during the Shining Path war; MVL's commission, as I remember it, said the event sprang from a primitive mountain people's mentalities of sacrifice; critics say the villagers were responding to living rumors about the actual events going on around them--but maybe I'm just a fantasist remembering an event according to the stereotypes I carry around with me).
The question is fascinating. Probably I should reread MVL's book and the reports on Uchurracay, read Cunha's book, etc.
My favorite -- of those of his I've read -- is also Conversation in the Cathedral. It helped to read it in a group. It took a while to understand what he was doing with time and place, but once I got the knack of it, I very much enjoyed it. For me the unfairness of life is a running theme in his works.
I remember reading, years ago, an essay by a Peruvian who said he could not reconcile the sympathetic breadth of Vargas Llosa's fiction with the conventional politican he eventually became. So there is no doubt fodder for wondering how deep his engagement with the poor and oppressed really was. I did not think the book was perfect; some of the military parts seemed improbable. But after years of reading historical fiction and medieval fantasy by people who know nothing at all about the past and don't even try to understand it, I was swept away by Vargas Llosa's ability to conjure a believable nineteenth century in which to situate this crazy story. My reading of most historical or quasi-historical writing is ruined by what strike me as horrid misunderstandings, and I never felt that way about this book.
I would stress that my first comment reflects my memory of the book filtered through my basic cynicism--which I have become skeptical has much value as an intellectual tool, though I cannot shake it--across several years. Hence my feeling that I should reread the book.
That said, I read a certain amount about MVL yesterday, and I'm starting to wonder if one couldn't apply to him the notion that the best writing springs from a writer's "crazy" inner fantasies and preoccupations, as John has often argued. The impression I'm starting to get is of a man working out a deep, obsessive, and perhaps paranoid ambivalence about his own society. I'm sure this approach has its critics (leftists are said to be bitter about his apparent abandonment of their side--back in the seventies, I think--and so one could say this psychoanalytic approach is just a tool they're using to get at him), but it has a psychological ring of truth to me. At least, it seems worth investigating. (I would stress I am NOT suggesting that this psychological germ-source of his work would make MVL a bad writer, or War of the End of the World a bad book. It may be that one should say the best history, i.e., the best conjuring of a compelling past, also arises from unbalanced obsessions.)
(On a side note, I learned that at least some writers prefer the formula MVLL, double L being regarded as a single letter in Spanish. But that set of initials jars in English; to me it looks like a strange sort of Roman numeral.)
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