Vargas Llosa takes the epigraph for his tome from Balzac: ". . .the
novel is the private history of nations." Peru, in this case, is
the giant chessboard on which the author moves his knights, rooks
and pawns in so many gambits and set pieces with the object of
checkmating the unseen military dictator General Odria. Santiago
Zavala, the son of millionaire capitalist and politician Don
Fermin, despite all the advantages, has "fucked up" as a mediocre
writer of editorials for a sensationalist Lima daily newspaper. His
accidental encounter with ex-chauffeur Ambrosio and their drunken
conversation in a cheap bar (the Cathedral of the title) is the
premise for the quadraphonic narration of the seamy events, both
political and personal, that determined the fates of the Zavala
household and the government. What Santiago discovers about his
upstanding genteel father one night in a brothel where he is
investigating the brutal stabbing of the lesbian mistress of the
Director of Public Order is enough to shatter the ideals of the
most naive of Communist sympathizers. . . . Vargas Llosa is an
ambitious and impressive craftsman, but Cathedral runs to more
grandiose and effusive proportions than his types can sustain and
lets down to a series of disconnected yawns. Even the politics are
so simplified that everyone - left, right, reform, coalition -
looks stupid. On the whole a disappointing performance from a
novelist whose earlier Time of the Hero and Green House were
superior. (Kirkus Reviews)
Conversation in the Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the
dictatorship of General Ordia. Suspicion, paranoia and blackmail
have become part of life. The conversation flows between two
individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented
lives and of the degradation and frustration that has taken over
their town. In this groundbreaking novel, Mario Vargas Llosa
explores the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the
people behind it. It is about identity, the role of a citizen and
how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a nation and its
people.
General
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