Books in Brief: The War of the End of the World

The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen R. Lane (Farrar, 568 pp., $18.95)

Mario Vargas Llosa, the outstanding Peruvian novelist, has chosen Brazil’s remote northeastern uplands in the late nineteenth century as the setting for this dark novel about the role of fanaticism in national life. The uplands are at center stage, and their people are well delineated from the simplest peasant to the most cultivated planter, but Vargas Llosa moves out of them to the coastal cities in order to show the relationship of events in their distant fastness to maneuvers at the highest level of Brazilian politics. A messianic and insane religious figure called the Counselor is the catalyst of the specific development traced in the novel. He leads a movement of at first equivocal purport that finds its fate in ignorant opposition to the recently established Brazilian republic. Fanaticism on the subjects of religion, restoration of the monarchy, and imposition of military dictatorship, combined with the most cynical political backstabbing, results finally in the death of tens of thousands of the Counselor’s followers and of not a few Brazilian soldiers. Such sanguinary pessimism may imbue the American reader with a sense of unreality. Vargas Llosa, however, writing from a Latin American point of view, reminds us, as in their different way do the writers exiled from the Iron Curtain countries, that much of the world lives in circumstances very different from our own.

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Francis Marnell

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The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen R. Lane (Farrar, 568 pp., $18.95)

Mario Vargas Llosa, the outstanding Peruvian novelist, has chosen Brazil’s remote northeastern uplands in the late nineteenth century as the setting for this dark novel about the role of fanaticism in national life. The uplands are at center stage, and their people are well delineated from the simplest peasant to the most cultivated planter, but Vargas Llosa moves out of them to the coastal cities in order to show the relationship of events in their distant fastness to maneuvers at the highest level of Brazilian politics. A messianic and insane religious figure called the Counselor is the catalyst of the specific development traced in the novel. He leads a movement of at first equivocal purport that finds its fate in ignorant opposition to the recently established Brazilian republic. Fanaticism on the subjects of religion, restoration of the monarchy, and imposition of military dictatorship, combined with the most cynical political backstabbing, results finally in the death of tens of thousands of the Counselor’s followers and of not a few Brazilian soldiers. Such sanguinary pessimism may imbue the American reader with a sense of unreality. Vargas Llosa, however, writing from a Latin American point of view, reminds us, as in their different way do the writers exiled from the Iron Curtain countries, that much of the world lives in circumstances very different from our own.