The Storyteller: A Novel

Mario VARGAS LLOSA

WHY I LOVED THIS BOOK

This year, following book blogs more closely, I waited with impatience for the Nobel Prize of Literature to be awarded…. to discover, at my own shame, that I had NEVER read anything by this author, and maybe even never heard his name.

This novel was the only one left at my library – so it seems that other readers DO pay attention to literary awards.

I have to say I had a hard time going into it, because of the translation I’m sure – lots of weird constructions, not flowing well, mainly at the beginning of the book. it seems that once the translator got going, she improved! – which makes sense, according to my own experiences as a translator!

But as my literary habits were led during many years by St Benedict, who urges you to keep reading a book once you have started it, I persevered, and I am glad I did.

This is quite different from any other book I have read, with its mix of Amazonian tales -and I knew nothing about them, of reflections on the place of nature in our lives, and of encouragement to find your self-identity and stick to it for survival sake, all of this in the midst of a story built into a story.

There are also lots of political undertones, as well as religious, for instance with a “symbolization” of the Jewish wandering and history, about 30 pages before the end. I was actually surprised at how clear it was, maybe a bit too clear.

This gives me the desire to read another of his novels, but I will try next time in Spanish directly, to enhance the enjoyment.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this dazzling novel, Vargas Llosa shows that “story-telling can be something more than mere entertainment.” In alternating chapters, he tells the story of Saul Zuratas, a Peruvian Jew who becomes a “hablador” (storyteller) to the Machiguengas–a tribe still wandering the Amazon jungle–and the tribe’s stories themselves. The examination of the roles of anthropologists and ecologists in preserving the integrity of native societies is here explicit, and the good reader reaps the rewards of a novel that tackles major political issues as it fulfills the basic human need to tell and hear stories. A well-written work, demanding that we think about the results of acculturation and ecological disaster.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈmaɾjo ˈβarɣaz ˈʎosa]; born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom.^[1] He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.