Mario Vargas Llosa and the novela de la selva

Abstract

This article considers the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's four Amazonian novels within the context of other twentieth-century works set in the region, especially the Latin-American novela de la selva, or jungle novel. Vargas Llosa's employment of techniques such as shifting, unreliable narrators, irony, parody and intertextuality are similar to jungle novels such as José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine, Rómulo Gallegos' Canaima, and Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos. Moreover, the presentation of Amazonia as a site of adventure, unbridled sexuality, violence and injustice clearly links Vargas Llosa's works to the Latin-American telluric novels of the 1920s and 1930s, despite the author's proclaimed low opinion of that genre. In fact, Vargas Llosa composes a literary wilderness that reveals his fractious and long-standing relationship with the novela de la selva. By examining the Peruvian writer's novelistic production over the course of fifty years, this article shows that Vargas Llosa's depiction of Amazonia pays a complicated homage to the jungle novel of the early twentieth century.