Vargas Llosa in Canudos

Abstract

ing in the novelistic ventures of Mario Vargas Llosa, in which abound enormous spaces, vast and complex temporal displacements, and masses of characters struggling among themselves and with History. The case of La guerra del fin del mundo, now available in English as The War of the End of the World,* however, is very special. Not only has the author here made his first excursion outside the physical and cultural reality of his native Peru, to which he had been rigorously faithful, but this is also the first of his novelistic endeavors to be inspired by a book, a classic book and, what's more, one written in another language. Thus he has produced a novel out of his devotion as a reader (and not, as always before, from the reworking of personal memories) and has paid rare homage to an author who allowed him to live vicariously an adventure which he, in turn, now wants the modern reader to live. The model for The War of the End of the World is Os Sertoes (1902; Eng. Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944) by Euclides da Cunha, one of the most important works in Brazilian literature. Like the Argentine writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's novel Facundo (1845), it is a book which defies precise classification because it contains elements of the essay, the chronicle, the sociological document, and journalism without falling exactly into any of these categories. A good deal of its meaning goes beyond literature. It is the portrait of the development of a society, one of the founding texts of the modern Brazilian nation. I believe this OVIEDO 51