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Magazine
Novels that matter
DAVID DAVIDAR
MANY years ago, I made a friend in an unexpected way. I was then working for a magazine in Bombay for which I'd just reviewed the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa's epic, The War of the End of the World. Just before I read the book I'd also finished his earlier comic masterpiece Aunt Julia and the Script Writer, so my review was pretty rapturous. That week I received a phone call from an American journalist who was visiting Bombay. Matt Miller worked for the Asian Wall Street Journal and was an ardent Llosa fan. He was calling because he'd just read my review and wanted to meet a fellow Llosa enthusiast. That marked the beginning of an enduring friendship and an equally long-term interest in the novelist's work.
To date, Vargas Llosa has published 17 books, the majority of them novels. As with any writer so prolific, his output isn't uniformly first-rate, but I would, without hesitation, put him down as among the world's top 10 living writers. In Latin America, so far as my knowledge of that region's literature goes, I'd rate only the peerless Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the two were once close friends before they fell out) higher.
I haven't read all Mario Vargas Llosa's work, but I have finished all those that rate as masterpieces. These would include in addition to the two novels I've mentioned, The Green House, In Praise of the Step Mother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. Of his slighter works, The Storyteller was first rate, but I didn't much care for The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Who Killed Palomino Molero? And, to be fair, I haven't read three of his early books (The Cubs and Other Stories, The Time of the Hero and Captain Pantoga and the Special Service) so I can't offer an opinion on any of them.
I have finished his latest novel, however, and it is a masterpiece. Yet another reason I'd say for the 66-year-old novelist to be given the Nobel Prize for Literature without delay.
The novel in question is called The Year of the Goat (Faber) and an ecstatic quote from the Times Literary Supplement on the front cover declares that The Feast of the Goat will stand out as the great emblematic novel of Latin America's 20th Century and removes One Hundred Years of Solitude of that title. This is patent nonsense, of course, for not only are the two books very different, in my view it would have to be a novel of unequalled brilliance that could overshadow Garcia Marquez's peerless novel. That said I wouldn't hesitate to call Llosa's book one of the finest contemporary novels I've ever read.
Baldly summarised, it is a fictional depiction of the last days of the tyrannical dictator of the Dominican Republic, Dr. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who was assassinated in 1961. Trujillo who ruled his country for decades was assassinated in his seventies by a group of conspirators, but by the time they got him he had succeeded in terrorising the country, and wrecking it completely. All power was centralised, people lived or died at the dictator's whim, the nation was bankrupt but nobody dared raise their voice against the man who had ruined their lives.
Uraina Cabral, through whose eyes we see Trujillo's despotic reign unfold, is one of the lucky ones. Before her father, a powerful minister and senator fell into disgrace (a common occurrence among those close to the dictator) he manages to send his daughter away to the United States. She does not return to the country for 30 years, but finally decides to go back to visit her father paralysed and incapacitated by a stroke. Trujillo is long gone and it is hard to believe that the country she finds on her return was once the terror-struck place she had fled. But as she spends time with her father the memories come flooding back and she revisits again the terrible secret at the heart of her own existence.
The Year of the Goat (the title is derived from Trujillo's nickname "The Goat") is a masterpiece, and I think it will go down as one of the classics of our time. It reminded me most of that other great novel about tyranny, Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez. It may not be One Hundred Years of Solitude but it is a novel that will be remembered as books are read.
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