Despite the fact that Mario Vargas Llosa is one of my favorite writers, I can hardly recommend him to friends and colleagues. Not taking into account the dylogy "A Praise for the Stepmother" and "The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto" all the rest, which I have already completed (although it is unfair to apply this "forced" word to the work of the famous Peruvian), must be read in one canvas, that is, minimally distracted from the text.
Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru in 1936, is the author of some of the most significant writing to come out of South America in the past fifty years. His novels include The Green House, about a brothel in a Peruvian town that brings together the innocent and the corrupt; The Feast of the Goat, a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo’s insidious regime; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a comedic semi-autobiographical account of an aspiring writer named Marito Varguitas, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucho.
The Green House also uses the author's technique, which has become customary for me - scattered scraps of a single story, small details, puzzles. This is not the case when several stories develop gradually and in parallel, and the author throws the reader from one to another, separating the transitions with chapters, spaces, ***stars, completing the story by combining all the lines into one. Llosa's book is quite different, and the inattentive reader will not get a pass here. It's not just a story made up of little strokes (lines), it's also episodes from different time periods. Imagine a strip that was cut into pieces and mixed together. And then the author dosed, like a careful doctor prescribes treatment, shows the parts, selecting them then from the end, then from the beginning, then from the middle of the story. And sometimes the episodes are so small that in the next sentence, the reader finds himself in another place and another time, and again has to figure out where this puzzle fits. Try distracting yourself from the plot for two days here! You'll be thinking, "Where did that come from?" for a long time. And the danger is precisely that all the spirit then comes out of the story, and you probably won't like the book.
So what is "The Green House" about? The brothel building, painted green, is a metaphorical symbol of the jungle, drowning in green, where all the events of the novel take place. There are many main characters, but for my convenience I have combined them into lines named after women - Boniface and Lalita - because all the fuss is going on around these two women, although these bright female characters are not central. The center is the life of the people in the jungle, their orders, their thinking, their faith, their customs, their prejudices, and so on and so forth.
And since I mentioned the women in the novel in the first place, I will go on about them. In general, you can call them women only in terms of physiology. Everything else that is commonly understood in modern society is absent here. The women of the jungle are... cows, livestock. With their trusting cow's eyes they look at their masters, follow them to their utmost, feed them, endure insults and abuse, endlessly bring in litter, unless, of course, the master allows or drunkenly masturbates the deeply pregnant cattle. The most important thing for these "women" is to be with the man, and now they change hands, because one husband was imprisoned, another was killed, the third ran away. They allow the master to bring Indian women and other girls into the house, hear him having fun with them on the next bunk, and then go to wash the laundry from under them and set the table. Most importantly, in front of the man.
There are many male characters, all seemingly different, but only Pilot Nieves stands out, who was both a good worker, a caring husband, and a kind father to not only his own children. However, it was he who paid the price for simply wanting to earn his bread. While the rest of the valiant company of "Japanese", "invincible", Harper, gendarmes and soldiers evokes not the most pleasant feelings. These men would climb into the jaws of a crocodile to defend their honor, but honor has long since left these places. Heat, mosquitoes, need, alcohol, weed - this is not an environment where you can expect to meet decent men, whose honor is not just a word. Even the notion of friendship sounds ridiculous here. For as soon as the door closes behind a "friend," and even a cousin (!), his faithful companions try to get under the skirt of his newfound wife. And that one... is a cow (but that was already mentioned above).
All in all, this is the kind of unsightly picture Llosa paints, not without irony. After all, all these characters, Christians, call the Indians of the jungle filthy pagans, people not that the third grade, but even monkeys, but they themselves are little different from them. Perhaps they can write and read, and cover their shame. But they live in their shame.
In spite of the filth of life, literally and figuratively, the story of Lituma, Bonifacia, Josefino, Lalita, Fucía, Nieves, Aquilino, Mother Angelica, Heavyweight, Hum, Governor Reategui, etc. (the list could be long) was read with great interest and without the fatigue that haunts me when reading historical novels by a Peruvian.
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