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A review by amslersf
The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa
3.0
I was so thrilled to find that Llosa had written a book about one of my heros, Roger Casement. Casement was an Irish revolutionary who also became one of the leaders in the first wave of international human rights work out of Europe. He documented colonial atrocities in the Congo and in the Amazon. Although he had a privileged upbringing in the North of Ireland, it was from the people of the Congo and the Amazon that Casement learned the both the physical costs of the colonial economy but also of the process of dehumanization. He would then return to England and Ireland and fight colonialism closer to home.
Llosa does a brilliant job imagining a particular aspet of the the life of Casement; how Casement's personal journal including no small amount of gay sex, becomes his undoing. I had first heard of Casement while in Ireland, although historians had embarrassingly kept him in the closet till late in the twentieth century. However it wasn't until reading Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost that I discovered his internationalism. Gay or not, his radical international solidarity should have put him in the mainstream of political thinking when I was visiting Belfast in the 1990s. There, republicans clearly saw their desire for independence from England as connected to international struggles for liberation in Palestine, Africa and the Americas.
Llosa's tale is a bit long winded. The Irish in Ireland have had to find peace with martyrs, but in America, I can't help looking for a more optimistic end. I'm a bit happier when I can see the arc, though long, bending towards justice. I'll be keeping my eyes open for a biography.
Llosa does a brilliant job imagining a particular aspet of the the life of Casement; how Casement's personal journal including no small amount of gay sex, becomes his undoing. I had first heard of Casement while in Ireland, although historians had embarrassingly kept him in the closet till late in the twentieth century. However it wasn't until reading Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost that I discovered his internationalism. Gay or not, his radical international solidarity should have put him in the mainstream of political thinking when I was visiting Belfast in the 1990s. There, republicans clearly saw their desire for independence from England as connected to international struggles for liberation in Palestine, Africa and the Americas.
Llosa's tale is a bit long winded. The Irish in Ireland have had to find peace with martyrs, but in America, I can't help looking for a more optimistic end. I'm a bit happier when I can see the arc, though long, bending towards justice. I'll be keeping my eyes open for a biography.