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delaguila19's review against another edition
3.0
No sè no me convenciò mucho la historia de rebelion contada por Mario vargas llosa, estuvo interesante pero creo que le faltò mas de su estilo, no pude reconocerlo por gaias enteras.
nonabgo's review against another edition
4.0
I have never encountered a Llosa book I did not like. The man has my heart and I think he can do no wrong. However, for a brief moment of two chapters, I was certain I would hate "Mayta".
The beginning is tedious, or at least it was for me. This novel is weirdly constructed - not only do the events happen on two different temporal planes, but these planes are intertwined in such a fashion that it is hard, without employing all your attention, to differentiate between them. We're (I, at least) used to historical novels that ping-pong between eras, but the transition is usually clearly marked, either by distinct paragraphs or different chapters. Mr Llosa is not that boring. He jumps back and forth between the two eras in the same paragraph, even in the same sentence sometimes.
There's this author writing a novel based on Alejandro Mayta's life. He does so by interviewing the people who knew Mayta (supposedly and old schoolmate of this unnamed author and a communist militant), who organized an attempted "revolution" and has now been missing for years. As the respondents tell their recollections, Mayta's voice intervenes and tells the story from his perspective - so, essentially, we have multiple first-person POVs: the author's (who describes his encounters with Mayta's co-conspirators), the interviewed persons', a different one in every chapter (who tell the story from their perspective and not always truthfully) and Mayta's (who jumps in to tell his story in between the others).
So a paragraph might start with the author asking someone about the events, that person responds, but sometime in the middle of the story, Mayta takes over with his version. And neither of them is a reliable teller, so in the end, nothing is made clear. Confusing, I know, but also what a stroke of genius!
I see this novel as a big fat parody of the "revolutionary" attempts in Peru. As it happens, there were quite a lot of organizations/ groups/ parties who called themselves communist, just as in this novel. Llosa portrays a state of disorganization that is purely laughable. There's Trotskyites, Leninists, Stalinists and probably other factions, each of them claiming to be the "true" communist party, but neither being very organized or willing to so more than meet and print flyers. And then here comes this idealist guy who is, up to one point, part of a 7-person "communist party", who takes it upon himself to actually organize a sort-of coup, without having any support other than that of a jail lieutenant and a few school boys.
It's absurdity at it's best and as someone who grew up in a former communist country, I laughed and laughed and laughed at Mayta's idealism and actions.
In fact, everything about this novel is absurd. We slowly find out that the author is not writing Mayta's biography, but a dystopian novel extremely loosely based on Mayta's life, but he still tries to find out the truth despite having absolutely no intention in using it. Everything is contradictory, there are no two people who tell the same truth, inspiring one character to ask whether history can be truly known, or is it just as fictitious as a novel. And we keep hoping until the end that Mayta himself, once the author finds him and meets him in person, is able to clear everything up, but he ends up being just as unreliable as the others and not knowing, despite being in the middle of the action, who did what and to what purpose.
Llosa takes us on a trip through Lima and Jauja in different times, describing in a cinematic fashion a not-so-pretty image of Peru. We're taken to slums and villages that don't have electricity or water, to grand buildings that outlive their glory years by sharing the same space with garbage piles. Nothing is beautiful, everything is in a state of decay that the people have learned to live with, not even minding the ever-growing waste. Poverty, terrorism, crime is everywhere - but somehow Llosa's dark humor manages to overshadow everything.
Llosa is a master of words (and I must also applaud the Romanian translator, Mihai Cantuniari, for the impeccable translation). His phrasing is stunning, mixing academic constructions with jargon and popular speech in a seamless fashion that only enhances the absurdity of the story. The dialogue is exactly to the extent that it has to be, the descriptive passages are just enough to build the atmosphere, but not to much to bore the reader. I just cannot recommend him enough. He - and this novel - are such gems of contemporary literature!
The beginning is tedious, or at least it was for me. This novel is weirdly constructed - not only do the events happen on two different temporal planes, but these planes are intertwined in such a fashion that it is hard, without employing all your attention, to differentiate between them. We're (I, at least) used to historical novels that ping-pong between eras, but the transition is usually clearly marked, either by distinct paragraphs or different chapters. Mr Llosa is not that boring. He jumps back and forth between the two eras in the same paragraph, even in the same sentence sometimes.
There's this author writing a novel based on Alejandro Mayta's life. He does so by interviewing the people who knew Mayta (supposedly and old schoolmate of this unnamed author and a communist militant), who organized an attempted "revolution" and has now been missing for years. As the respondents tell their recollections, Mayta's voice intervenes and tells the story from his perspective - so, essentially, we have multiple first-person POVs: the author's (who describes his encounters with Mayta's co-conspirators), the interviewed persons', a different one in every chapter (who tell the story from their perspective and not always truthfully) and Mayta's (who jumps in to tell his story in between the others).
So a paragraph might start with the author asking someone about the events, that person responds, but sometime in the middle of the story, Mayta takes over with his version. And neither of them is a reliable teller, so in the end, nothing is made clear. Confusing, I know, but also what a stroke of genius!
I see this novel as a big fat parody of the "revolutionary" attempts in Peru. As it happens, there were quite a lot of organizations/ groups/ parties who called themselves communist, just as in this novel. Llosa portrays a state of disorganization that is purely laughable. There's Trotskyites, Leninists, Stalinists and probably other factions, each of them claiming to be the "true" communist party, but neither being very organized or willing to so more than meet and print flyers. And then here comes this idealist guy who is, up to one point, part of a 7-person "communist party", who takes it upon himself to actually organize a sort-of coup, without having any support other than that of a jail lieutenant and a few school boys.
It's absurdity at it's best and as someone who grew up in a former communist country, I laughed and laughed and laughed at Mayta's idealism and actions.
In fact, everything about this novel is absurd. We slowly find out that the author is not writing Mayta's biography, but a dystopian novel extremely loosely based on Mayta's life, but he still tries to find out the truth despite having absolutely no intention in using it. Everything is contradictory, there are no two people who tell the same truth, inspiring one character to ask whether history can be truly known, or is it just as fictitious as a novel. And we keep hoping until the end that Mayta himself, once the author finds him and meets him in person, is able to clear everything up, but he ends up being just as unreliable as the others and not knowing, despite being in the middle of the action, who did what and to what purpose.
Llosa takes us on a trip through Lima and Jauja in different times, describing in a cinematic fashion a not-so-pretty image of Peru. We're taken to slums and villages that don't have electricity or water, to grand buildings that outlive their glory years by sharing the same space with garbage piles. Nothing is beautiful, everything is in a state of decay that the people have learned to live with, not even minding the ever-growing waste. Poverty, terrorism, crime is everywhere - but somehow Llosa's dark humor manages to overshadow everything.
Llosa is a master of words (and I must also applaud the Romanian translator, Mihai Cantuniari, for the impeccable translation). His phrasing is stunning, mixing academic constructions with jargon and popular speech in a seamless fashion that only enhances the absurdity of the story. The dialogue is exactly to the extent that it has to be, the descriptive passages are just enough to build the atmosphere, but not to much to bore the reader. I just cannot recommend him enough. He - and this novel - are such gems of contemporary literature!
tessaays's review
2.0
Sigh, I so wanted to love this book, but it was just an absolute slog to get through. Vargas Llosa is clearly a technical master, but it felt as if he was a concert pianist trying to play someone else’s poorly composed music - you KNOW he’s incredible at what he does, but ultimately it just had no heart, and you couldn’t stay engaged. I almost gave up several times. It got better towards the end, but the first three-quarters of the plot spent all its energy on agonisingly detailed interrogation of the early socialist movement in Peru (a subject that’s ALREADY tough to get into if you’re not a historian or a specialist) and didn’t have enough plot or human interest to actually be readable. I also couldn’t get used to the perspective change between the narrator and Mayta. It’s clever and interesting (places history in the present, brings the narrator into “direct” contact with his subject, interesting temporal play, etc etc) but it’s also jarring and makes many of the early chapters near-unreadable. I had to stop and re-read a page tens of times because I couldn’t pinpoint where the perspective changed from current to historical, even when I was looking for it. I’m ok with doing some work as a reader but this was just too much, and it really ruined the experience for me. Overall - a shame. I had high expectations.
cronosmu's review against another edition
4.0
Historia de Mayta es un libro donde la ficción se imagina a sí misma. Un escritor, el mismo Vargas Llosa, busca escribir una novela acerca de un personaje que en los años cincuenta protagonizó una insurrección fallida, al borde del ridículo, que buscaba implantar el comunismo en el Perú. Ya en los años ochenta, durante el apogeo del terrorismo de Sendero Luminoso, el escritor se enfrasca en la tarea de narrar esta historia y para eso rastrea a los personajes que conocieron a Alejandro Mayta. Al mismo tiempo se va elaborando, en un plano narrativo paralelo, no la historia definitiva de este hombre y su aventura, sino la posible, y esto es así porque si los testimonios no son fiables, si la memoria es un engaño, entonces la ficción se vuelve el único medio para construir un relato verosímil, que bien puede o no ser del todo fiel a lo sucedido. Lo brillante de la novela es que es en sí misma un juego. Uno como lector puede estar siendo engañado por los dos Varguitas, el escritor y el personaje. ¿Existió Mayta? Y si existió ¿hasta qué punto coincide su vida auténtica con el retrato que el escritor hace de él? Lo mejor, sin duda, es ese último capítulo que, sin exagerar, se puede decir que es magistral.
Aunque no está entre sus novelas más trepidantes, se trata, a mi modo de ver, de una de sus obras más injustamente olvidadas. Sería una pena que todo buen lector de Vargas Llosa (y por añadidura, cualquiera que esté interesado en el tema de cómo se construye una novela) se pierda de este libro.
Aunque no está entre sus novelas más trepidantes, se trata, a mi modo de ver, de una de sus obras más injustamente olvidadas. Sería una pena que todo buen lector de Vargas Llosa (y por añadidura, cualquiera que esté interesado en el tema de cómo se construye una novela) se pierda de este libro.
leda's review against another edition
dark
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
gef's review against another edition
3.0
As Vargas Llosa tells it in La historia secreta de una novela (1983 ed. Barcelona: Tasquets, 1971), La casa verde resulted from his attempts to weld together two unrelated novels that he was trying to write on alternate days. La tía Julia y el escribidor and Historia de Mayta must have similarly disconnected origins. The first is a joining of the story of Varguitas' romance of his tía Julia, to a story about somebody MVLL knew, possibly in the same period, el escribidor ("the scribbler") of radionovelas. As I recall, neither is essential to the other, & the only connection is that the same young man, Varguitas, is a protagonist in one and an observer in the other.
Mayta is even curiouser in its structure. The author (MVLL's narrators are almost always transparent versions of himself) seems to have conducted a real investigation into the history of a real revolutionary of the late 1950s. He presents his speculative findings (because the research in newpaper archives and interviews of survivors and witnesses leaves many questions still in dispute) through a multilayered veil of fiction. But even the first layer is not completely coherent. He presents himself as a novelist who wants to write a fictitious account of real events, and yet needs to know as exactly as possible what those real events were, as a way, he says - I don't remember the phrases, because he offers this explanation several times to doubting interview prospects - to know how much he is lying. O.k., that may be questionable strategy, but not implausible. But then he presents himself as a former schoolmate of Mayta, and therefore of the same age. This age is never stated more precisely than "cuarentón" at the time of the crucial events, which must be 1958 - Fidel Castro is still in the mountains, shortly before entering Havana. The narrator's quest takes place "now," which seems to be 1983 -- the book came out in 1984 - by which time, to follow the logic of the first premise, both he and Mayta would have to be at least 66. However, the conversations & reflections of the narrator, & his relationship to the people he interviews, seem to be those of a man no older than the real Vargas Llosa, born 1936. How do I know? Well, he doesn't seem to have any personal memories of Perú prior to the events of 1958 - his description of school days with Mayta are generic, could be from any period - nor any acquaintance with any of his interviewees or their contexts that goes back even to that time. A second & more glaring inconsistency is the age of Mayta's tía, 70 when the narrator interviews her. That is, she is barely, if at all, older than Mayta himself, but is supposed to have reared him.
Then there is the author's strange decision to locate the events of 1983 in a fantastically apocalytic Perú, which has been invaded, most implausibly, by a combined Cuban and Bolivian revolutionary force and is then also invaded by U.S. Marines to combat the first invaders, leaving the Peruvian armed forces on the margin and causing great destruction from terrorist attacks and air-raids. Enough social violence was already occurring in Perú in 1983 to make this whole scene completely unnecessary, as well as ridiculously implausible. Worse, it is not fully imagined. We never meet or even see one of those "Marines" (everybody uses the English word) or terrucos, nor is there any attempt to explain how the Cuban-Bolivian revolutionary army could have been formed or how they can defend their bases in Bolivia from air or other attacks - it would be possible to make such a case, I suppose, but what would be the point?
In the course of the novel, MVL slides from one p.o.v. to another, beginning a sentence in the 3rd person, about Mayta, and ending in the 1st, as Mayta, or sometimes in the 1st as himself. The maneuver is tricky but generally successful, but there are places where it didn't make sense. I don't remember just what it was, but I think there are places where Mayta as "I" is saying things that the character could not possibly know.
Then at the end, MVL undoes his whole fiction, by claiming to have met the real prototype, who is now an ex-con and an employee in an ice cream parlor. He confesses to having invented the Perú apocalíptico for no good reason he can explain, and also to have invented - both to strengthen his fictional Mayta's motivations and to explain how he became alienated from his political party on the eve of the revolutionary action - Mayta's homosexuality. This is a very important theme in the development of the character of the fictional Mayta. However, it turns out to be not the case at all of the "real" Mayta, the one he claims to have found and interviewed after writing his whole novel. This "real" Mayta is perhaps more interesting than the fictional one, & although he claims not to be prejudiced, is surprised and a little disgusted by the attribution of homosexuality. He's married with several kids, and knows homosexuals chiefly from having seen them depraved and exploited in Lurigancho prison.
It's about fragmentation, about pulling many different threads and styles and premises together into one work and achieving coherence. Vargas Llosa, for all his brilliance, does not always pull it off. I was moved and amazed by Historia de Mayta, but also disappointed in it as an aesthetic construct. Come to think of it, La ciudad y los perros is also two stories attached to but not integrated into one another. Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the only one of his novels I can think of right now that is fully integrated and coherent, in the same way as GGM's Crónica de una muerte anunciada.
In MVLL, I admire the technical virtuosity, in swift shifts of p.o.v., pacing of actions, and the pitiless descriptions, like lingering close-ups of garbage, or broken lives, or ruined apartments, etc. In Gabriel García Márquez I admire enormously the aesthetic integration he usually manages to achieve, starting from ideas and perceptions just as diverse as MVLL's.
Mayta is even curiouser in its structure. The author (MVLL's narrators are almost always transparent versions of himself) seems to have conducted a real investigation into the history of a real revolutionary of the late 1950s. He presents his speculative findings (because the research in newpaper archives and interviews of survivors and witnesses leaves many questions still in dispute) through a multilayered veil of fiction. But even the first layer is not completely coherent. He presents himself as a novelist who wants to write a fictitious account of real events, and yet needs to know as exactly as possible what those real events were, as a way, he says - I don't remember the phrases, because he offers this explanation several times to doubting interview prospects - to know how much he is lying. O.k., that may be questionable strategy, but not implausible. But then he presents himself as a former schoolmate of Mayta, and therefore of the same age. This age is never stated more precisely than "cuarentón" at the time of the crucial events, which must be 1958 - Fidel Castro is still in the mountains, shortly before entering Havana. The narrator's quest takes place "now," which seems to be 1983 -- the book came out in 1984 - by which time, to follow the logic of the first premise, both he and Mayta would have to be at least 66. However, the conversations & reflections of the narrator, & his relationship to the people he interviews, seem to be those of a man no older than the real Vargas Llosa, born 1936. How do I know? Well, he doesn't seem to have any personal memories of Perú prior to the events of 1958 - his description of school days with Mayta are generic, could be from any period - nor any acquaintance with any of his interviewees or their contexts that goes back even to that time. A second & more glaring inconsistency is the age of Mayta's tía, 70 when the narrator interviews her. That is, she is barely, if at all, older than Mayta himself, but is supposed to have reared him.
Then there is the author's strange decision to locate the events of 1983 in a fantastically apocalytic Perú, which has been invaded, most implausibly, by a combined Cuban and Bolivian revolutionary force and is then also invaded by U.S. Marines to combat the first invaders, leaving the Peruvian armed forces on the margin and causing great destruction from terrorist attacks and air-raids. Enough social violence was already occurring in Perú in 1983 to make this whole scene completely unnecessary, as well as ridiculously implausible. Worse, it is not fully imagined. We never meet or even see one of those "Marines" (everybody uses the English word) or terrucos, nor is there any attempt to explain how the Cuban-Bolivian revolutionary army could have been formed or how they can defend their bases in Bolivia from air or other attacks - it would be possible to make such a case, I suppose, but what would be the point?
In the course of the novel, MVL slides from one p.o.v. to another, beginning a sentence in the 3rd person, about Mayta, and ending in the 1st, as Mayta, or sometimes in the 1st as himself. The maneuver is tricky but generally successful, but there are places where it didn't make sense. I don't remember just what it was, but I think there are places where Mayta as "I" is saying things that the character could not possibly know.
Then at the end, MVL undoes his whole fiction, by claiming to have met the real prototype, who is now an ex-con and an employee in an ice cream parlor. He confesses to having invented the Perú apocalíptico for no good reason he can explain, and also to have invented - both to strengthen his fictional Mayta's motivations and to explain how he became alienated from his political party on the eve of the revolutionary action - Mayta's homosexuality. This is a very important theme in the development of the character of the fictional Mayta. However, it turns out to be not the case at all of the "real" Mayta, the one he claims to have found and interviewed after writing his whole novel. This "real" Mayta is perhaps more interesting than the fictional one, & although he claims not to be prejudiced, is surprised and a little disgusted by the attribution of homosexuality. He's married with several kids, and knows homosexuals chiefly from having seen them depraved and exploited in Lurigancho prison.
It's about fragmentation, about pulling many different threads and styles and premises together into one work and achieving coherence. Vargas Llosa, for all his brilliance, does not always pull it off. I was moved and amazed by Historia de Mayta, but also disappointed in it as an aesthetic construct. Come to think of it, La ciudad y los perros is also two stories attached to but not integrated into one another. Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the only one of his novels I can think of right now that is fully integrated and coherent, in the same way as GGM's Crónica de una muerte anunciada.
In MVLL, I admire the technical virtuosity, in swift shifts of p.o.v., pacing of actions, and the pitiless descriptions, like lingering close-ups of garbage, or broken lives, or ruined apartments, etc. In Gabriel García Márquez I admire enormously the aesthetic integration he usually manages to achieve, starting from ideas and perceptions just as diverse as MVLL's.
epictetsocrate's review against another edition
3.0
ALERGATUL dis-de-dimineaţă pe Malecón de Barranco, atunci când umezeala nopţii îmbibă încă aerul, şi face ca străzile să fie lunecoase şi lucii, este un fel potrivit de a-ţi începe ziua. Cerul e sur, chiar şi în toiul verii, fiindcă soarele nu se iveşte niciodată deasupra cartierului înainte de ora zece, şi ceaţa estompează marginea lucrurilor, silueta pescăruşilor, conturul pelicanului ce taie în zbor linia frântă a falezei. Marea – aşa îi spunem noi Pacificului – îţi apare plumburie, verde-închis, fumegândă, nărăvaşă, cu pete de spumă şi cu valuri ce înaintează ritmic spre mal, păstrând mereu aceeaşi distanţă între ele. Uneori, o bărcuţă de pescari se leagănă săltată de unde; alteori, o răbufnire de vânt goneşte norii şi dezvăluie hăt-departe La Punta şi insulele pământii San Lorenzo şi El Frontón. Este un peisaj frumos, cu condiţia să-ţi aţinteşti privirea la elemente şi la păsări. Fiindcă tot ce a făcut omul, în schimb, e urât.
pollo's review against another edition
4.0
No entiendo como no se habla más de este novelón, una especie de Conversación en La Catedral en versión reducida, pero que incluye una ucronía (de lo que hubiera pasado en el Perú si el conflicto armado interno tomaba rumbos más graves) y además la propia historia de la elaboración de la libro (con Vargas Llosa como personaje en busca de testimonios).
Con la clásica técnica vargasllosiana de combinar diálogos de distintos tiempos (La casa verde) y mezclar primera a tercera persona en una misma frase (Los cachorros), acercándonos y alejándonos del protagonista (aunque de una forma menos efectiva que con Pichulita Cuellar), en diez capítulos vamos descifrando, a través de un largo conjunto de conversaciones (como en la larga plática entre Zavalita y Ambrosio), la evolución política y personal de Alejandro Mayta, y su frustración, como la de todos los personajes, en los que ninguno es feliz y nos acerca a la resignación y a la imposibilidad del cambio o de descubrir la verdad de sus primeras novelas como La ciudad y los perros.
Todo teniendo como marco la triste y violenta situación de nuestro país, que, como Barranco, parece un círculo sin fin entre la belleza del malecón y la sordidez de los basurales.
Con la clásica técnica vargasllosiana de combinar diálogos de distintos tiempos (La casa verde) y mezclar primera a tercera persona en una misma frase (Los cachorros), acercándonos y alejándonos del protagonista (aunque de una forma menos efectiva que con Pichulita Cuellar), en diez capítulos vamos descifrando, a través de un largo conjunto de conversaciones (como en la larga plática entre Zavalita y Ambrosio), la evolución política y personal de Alejandro Mayta, y su frustración, como la de todos los personajes, en los que ninguno es feliz y nos acerca a la resignación y a la imposibilidad del cambio o de descubrir la verdad de sus primeras novelas como La ciudad y los perros.
Todo teniendo como marco la triste y violenta situación de nuestro país, que, como Barranco, parece un círculo sin fin entre la belleza del malecón y la sordidez de los basurales.
caterinaanna's review against another edition
4.0
Several members of the library reading group found [b:The Falls|37781|Things Fall Apart|Chinua Achebe|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352082529s/37781.jpg|825843] confusing because of the time shifts: goodness knows what they would have made of this one which moves voice, place and time within a single paragraph - sometimes, I suspect, within a single sentence!
Mayta is a failed revolutionary who we, and the sometime narrator, get to know through interviews with people who knew him. Of course all of these people have seen a different side of Alejandro, all have a particular perspective on the events of the past, and all have their own agenda in talking to the author. While the author reflects on this, he presents his view of events as a narrative interwoven with the interviews. Trusting this is one way to read the novel; assuming it is merely a single, and possibly unreliable, synthesis is another. Some people have said there is a twist at the end, in the final interview with Mayta himself, however I thought the revelations of this section were consistent with the man I'd pieced together - someone whose willinggness to trust others, even while doubting them, led to his downfall.
Mayta is a failed revolutionary who we, and the sometime narrator, get to know through interviews with people who knew him. Of course all of these people have seen a different side of Alejandro, all have a particular perspective on the events of the past, and all have their own agenda in talking to the author. While the author reflects on this, he presents his view of events as a narrative interwoven with the interviews. Trusting this is one way to read the novel; assuming it is merely a single, and possibly unreliable, synthesis is another. Some people have said there is a twist at the end, in the final interview with Mayta himself, however I thought the revelations of this section were consistent with the man I'd pieced together - someone whose willinggness to trust others, even while doubting them, led to his downfall.