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A review by nonabgo
Istoria lui Mayta by Mihai Cantuniari, Mario Vargas Llosa
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!