Llosa Mario Vargas

What are the mechanisms that uphold a dictatorship? Vargas Llosa sets out from history, from real protagonists and events, to investigate the dark allure of the despot, and he does so starting from a cruel character in whom the peculiarities of tyranny have been distilled, stripped of the smokescreen of ideologies and good manners. We read from the Treccani Encyclopedia that Trujillo ruled the Dom

Don Rigoberto is the director of a major insurance company, has just retired, and is about to embark on his long-awaited trip to Europe. He is a cultured man, a lover of literature: he chose a managerial career "out of cowardice," deciding to > not be a creator, only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. (...) How sad to be forced to deal with lawyers and judges, (...) instead of immersi

Roger Casement was born in 1864, in the century of the West’s conquest of the world—of that which styled itself as civilization. And the young Roger believes firmly in this civilizing and adventurous spirit, to the point of deciding to go to the Congo, then a land of Belgian conquest. Yet there, reality confronts him in a profoundly different way: > those poor people whipped, mutilated, those

Vargas Llosa defined the writer's work as > two things at once: a reconstruction of reality and a testimony to the dissent (of the writer) from the world. Indissolubly united, these two ingredients will appear in the (writer's) work, one objective and the other subjective: the reality with which (the writer) finds himself at odds and the reasons for this enmity; life as it is and what he would

> How was it possible that there, at the end of the world.... something different ordered things, men, time, death, something that it would be unjust to call madness and too broad to call faith and superstition . Such are the reflections of one of the protagonists of an incredible, and in some respects indecipherable, book. Vargas Llosa recounts an actual event that took place in Brazil in 188