Bøger af Mario Vargas Llosa

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREOne of Latin America's most garlanded novelists-and the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature-Mario Vargas Llosa is also an acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones collects Vargas Llosa's brilliant readings of seminal twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness to The Tin Drum; incisive essays on political and social thinkers; and contemporary pieces on 9/11 and the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq.Fantastically intelligent, inspired, and surprising, Touchstones is a landmark collection of essays from one of the world's leading writers and intellectuals.

¿Cuáles son los postulados liberales de Vargas Llosa?¿Cuál es su posición ante la realidad latinoamericana?¿Cuáles son los peligros y esperanzas que vislumbra para el continente?¿Cómo han tomado forma sus ideas y compromisos? La selección de ensayos que compone este volumen pretende aclarar estas cuestiones. En ellos, además de verse reflejado el recorrido intelectual del escritor, se analizan todos los grandes acontecimientos que han marcado la historia reciente de América Latina. No están ordenados cronológicamente sino por temas, ilustrando las batallas que Vargas Llosa ha dado por la libertad, desde su oposición frontal a las dictaduras, su ilusión y posterior desencanto con las revoluciones, sus críticas al nacionalismo, al populismo, al indigenismo y a la corrupción —mayor amenaza para la credibilidad de las democracias—, hasta el descubrimiento de las ideas liberales, su defensa irrestricta del sistema democrático y su pasión por la literatura y el arte latinoamericano. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION The essays in this volume were selected to shed light on Vargas Llosa's liberal postulates, his stance on the Latin-American reality, the hopes and threats he anticipates for the continent, and his ideas and commitments. In addition to portraying the author's intellectual trajectory, this is an analysis of the most important events to mark the recent history of Latin America.

"Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the master storytellers of our time." -- Chicago TribuneFrom the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature comes a haunting novel about power, corruption, and the complex search for identity.Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town.Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis, Conversation in The Cathedral is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThis wonderful detective novel is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the northern desert, a young airman is found murdered. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad car, they have to cajole a local cabbie into taking them to the scene of the crime. Their superiors are indifferent; the commanding officer of the air base stands in their way; but Silva and Lituma are determined to uncover the truth.Who Killed Palomino Molero, an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery, takes up one of Vargas Llosa's characteristic themes: the despair at how hard it is to be an honest man in a corrupt society.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThe Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is an astute psychological portrait of a modern revolutionary and a searching account of an old friend's struggle to understand him. First published in English in 1986, the novel probes the long and checkered history of radical politics in Latin America.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThis delightful farce opens as the prim and proper Captain Pantoja learns he is to be sent to Peru's Amazon frontier on a secret mission for the army-to provide females for the amorous recruits. Side-splitting complications arise as world of Captain Pantoja's remarkable achievements start to spread.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThe Cubs and Other Stories is Mario Vargas Llosa's only volume of short fiction available in English. Vargas Llosa's domain is the Peru of male youth and machismo, where life's dramas play themselves out on the soccer field, the dance floor, and on street corners.The title story, "The Cubs," tells the story of the carefree boyhood of P.P. Cuellar and his friends, and of P.P.'s bizarre accident and tragic coming of age. Innovative in style and technique, it is a work of both physical and psychic loss.In a candid and perceptive forward to this collection of early writing, Vargas llosa provides background to the volume and a unique glimpse into the mind of the Nobel Prize-winning artist.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThe book's first section is a tete-a-tete with Emma Bovary; the second traces the gestation and birth of the novel, as well as Flaubert's method, his mania for documentation, and the novel's literary sources; the third situates it in literary history. Vargas Llosa's first work of non-fiction will send the reader back to Flaubert's masterpiece with renewed interest.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThe action of The Time of the Hero, Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa's first novel, takes place at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Peru. There, four angry cadets who have formed an inner circle in an attempt to ward off the boredom and stifling confinement of the military academy set off a chain of events that starts with a theft and leads to murder and suicide. The Time of the Hero presents, with great accuracy and power, the cadets' nightmare life: brutal initiation rights, poker in the latrines, drinking contests; and, above all else, the strange military code which, whether broken or followed, can only destroy.When The Time of the Hero was first published in Peru in 1962, it was considered so scandalous that a thousand copies were burned in an official ceremony at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy. That same year, the book received the Biblioteca Breve Prize, an award given to the best work of fiction in the Spanish language."...[A]s with other fine writers, Vargas functions on more than a single level of meaning." - The New York Times

Ambientada en un remoto pueblo de montaäna, Lituma en los Andes comienza como una novela policíaca sobre la desapariciâon de tres lugareänos. El cabo Lituma y su ayudante Tomâas sospechan de Sendero Luminoso, la organizaciâon guerrillera que viene sembrando el terror en el Perâu. Pero la intriga adquiere visos inesperados cuando se descubren crueles prácticas ancestrales en la zona, y la narraciâon va ganando dimensiones conforme las pesquisas se alternan con los recuerdos âintimos de los protagonistas. Con un virtuoso manejo de la trama, la psicología y los gâeneros, Mario Vargas Llosa ofrece al cabo una profunda meditaciâon sobre la sociedad peruana y sus males histâoricos.

La más reciente novela del Premio Nobel de Literatura Mario Vargas Llosa.«Él había pensado que, después de todo, un periodista puede ser a veces útil. "Y también peligroso", concluyó. Tuvo el presentimiento de que nada bueno saldría de esta visita.»«La idea de esta novela comenzó con una imagen de dos señoras amigas que de pronto una noche, de una manera impensada para ambas, viven una situación erótica. Luego se fue convirtiendo en una historia policial, casi un thriller, y el thriller se fue transformando en una especie de mural de la sociedad peruana en los últimos meses o semanas de la dictadura de Fujimori y Montesinos. Me gustó la idea de que la historia se llamase Cinco esquinas como un barrio que, de alguna manera, es emblemático de Lima, de Perú y también de la época en la que está situada la historia.»Si hay un tema que permea, que impregna toda la historia, es el periodismo, el periodismo amarillo. La dictadura de Fujimori utilizó el periodismo amarillo, el periodismo de escándalo, como un arma política para desprestigiar y aniquilar moralmente a todos sus adversarios. Al mismo tiempo, también está la otra cara, cómo el periodismo, que puede ser algo vil y sucio, puede convertirse de pronto en un instrumento de liberación, de defensa moral y cívica de una sociedad. Esas dos caras del periodismo son uno de los temas centrales de Cinco esquinas.»Mario Vargas LlosaENGLISH DESCRIPTIONA thrilling tale of desire and Peruvian corruption swirls around a scandalous exposé that leads to murderFrom the Nobel Laureate comes a politically charged detective novel weaving through the underbelly of Peruvian privilege. In the 1990s, during the turbulent and deeply corrupt years of Alberto Fujimori's presidency, two wealthy couples of Lima's high society become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail. One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposés. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru's unspoken laws and customs, while the staff of the magazine embark on their greatest exposé yet.Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, the novel swirls into the kind of restless realism that has become Mario Vargas Llosa's signature style. A twisting, unpredictable tale, The Neighborhood is at once a scathing indictment of Fujimori's regime and a crime thriller that evokes the vulgarity of freedom in a corrupt system.

Creando una admirable tensión entre lo cómico y lo trágico, el Premio Nobel de Literatura y Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, Mario Vargas Llosa, libera en esta novela una historia en la que el amor se nos muestra indefinible, dueño de mil caras, como la niña mala. ¿Cuál es el verdadero rostro del amor? Ricardo ve cumplido, a una edad muy temprana, el sueño que en su Lima natal alimentó desde que tenía uso de razón: vivir en París. Pero el rencuentro con un amor de adolescencia lo cambiará todo. La joven, inconformista, aventurera, pragmática e inquieta, lo arrastrará fuera del pequeño mundo de sus ambiciones. Testigos de épocas convulsas y florecientes en ciudades como Londres, París, Tokio o Madrid, que aquí son mucho más que escenarios, ambos personajes verán sus vidas entrelazarse sin llegar a coincidir del todo. Sin embargo, esta danza de encuentros y desencuentros hará crecer la intensidad del relato página a página hasta propiciar una verdadera fusión del lector con el universo emocional de los protagonistas. Mario Vargas Llosa juega en Travesuras de la niña mala (2006) con la realidad y la ficción para ilustrar la complejidad del amor: pasión y distancia, azar y destino, dolor y disfrute... ¿Cuál es el verdadero rostro del amor? La crítica ha dicho...«Una novela de amor de hoy, de erotismo, con encuentros, separaciones, sufrimientos, engaños, entrega, y también mucha verdad, y en la que Vargas Llosa, a modo de entomólogo, analiza minuciosamente la condición humana, como su gran admirado Flaubert en La educación sentimental, obra que se cita en la novela, entre otras muchas referencias literarias a las que alude el autor. Y es que la idea de novela para Vargas Llosa es "la experiencia totalizadora de la condición humana".»El País «La niña mala recuerda a los amorosos de Sabines: buscan la felicidadsin nunca encontrarla, pues encontrarla equivaldría a perderla sin remedio. Muy recomendable esta novela, en apariencia modesta, pero que en realidad rasca con saña exquisita en nuestros más íntimos deseos y frustraciones domésticas.»Javier Munguía, Revista de LetrasENGLISH DESCRIPTIONA New York Times Notable Book of 2007"Splendid, suspenseful, and irresistible . . . A contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s--and 70s and 80s."--The New York Times Book ReviewRicardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling, epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.

Década de los setenta en una pequeña ciudad de California. "Bean" Holladay tiene doce años y su hermana Liz quince cuando su madre las abandona "para encontrarse a sí misma" y triunfar en la música. Aunque les deja dinero para subsistir un mes o dos, las pequeñas tienen miedo de acabar siendo recogidas por los servicios sociales y deciden viajar a Virginia, donde su tío Tinsley vive en la decadente mansión que ha sido la casa de su familia durante generaciones. Pero el pequeño pueblo en el que nacieron ha cambiado mucho, y la vida es muy diferente. Ante la escasez de dinero, las hermanas tendrán que hacer pequeños trabajos para Jerry Maddox, el poderoso capataz de la algodonera. Las niñas deberán adaptarse para volver a empezar a la vez que descubrirán la historia oculta de quién es su padre y por qué su madre tuvo que abandonar Virginia. Jeannette Walls vuelve a conmover con una novela sobre la familia, la amistad y el triunfo de la justicia frente a la adversidad. Y sobre personas que encuentran un modo de amar a los demás y al mundo pese a todos sus defectos. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Deep within the remote backlands of 19th century Brazil sits Canudos, a libertarian's paradise. Home of prostitutes, bandits, and beggars, Canudos embodies the revolutionary spirit in its purest and most apocalyptic form. In one of his most brilliant and tragic novels, Mario Vargas Llosa creates an unforgettable tale of passion, idealism, adventure, and man's struggle to be free. It is an exhaustively documented account of a historical event and a fundamental book in 20th century literature.

Conversación en La Catedral es algo más que un hito en el derrotero literario del Premio Nobel de Literatura Mario Vargas Llosa: es un punto de referencia insoslayable, un dato fijo en la historia de la literatura actual. Zavalita y el zambo Ambrosio conversan en La Catedral. Estamos en Perú, durante el «ochenio» dictatorial del general Manuel A. Odría. Unas cuantas cervezas y un río de palabras en libertad para responder a la palabra amordazada por la dictadura.Conversación en La Catedral (1969) no es, sin embargo, una novela histórica. Sus personajes, las historias que éstos cuentan, los fragmentos que van encajando, conforman la descripción minuciosa de un envilecimiento colectivo, el repaso de todos los caminos que hacen desembocar a un pueblo entero en la frustración.Conversación en La Catedral es una cruda radiografía del envilecimiento y la frustración de la sociedad peruana bajo la presión de un poder dictatorial.«Si tuviera que salvar del fuego una sola de las [novelas] que he escrito, salvaría ésta.»Mario Vargas LlosaENGLISH DESCRIPTIONA conversation is held in the Cathedral during the Manuel A. Odría dictatorship in Peru; over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation describes the degradation and the frustration of a town. Through a complicated web of private lives, the author analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. Conversación en la Catedral is more than a point of reference; it is a landmark in the history of present Literature.

Narra la historia paralela de dos personajes: el ordenado y entrañable Felicito Yanaqué, un pequeño empresario de Piura, que es extorsionado; y de Ismael Carrera, un exitoso hombre de negocios, dueño de una aseguradora en Lima.It tells the parallel story of two characters: the tidy and endearing Yanaque, a small businessman of Piura, which is extorted; and Ismael Carrera, a successful businessman, owner of an insurer in Lima.JUNE 2015

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREInternationally acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has contributed a biweekly column to Spain's major newspaper, El País, since 1977. In this collection of columns from the 1990s, Vargas Llosa weighs in on the burning questions of the last decade, including the travails of Latin American democracy, the role of religion in civic life, and the future of globalization. But Vargas Llosa's influence is hardly limited to politics. In some of the liveliest critical writing of his career, he makes a pilgrimage to Bob Marley's shrine in Jamaica, celebrates the sexual abandon of Carnaval in Rio, and examines the legacies of Vermeer, Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others.

I sin ungdom i forelsker Ricardo sig i den slemme pige, som slet ikke virker så slem endda. Da han senere møder hende i Paris, brænder hans kærlighed fortsat med samme altfortærende styrke, og som den pæne dreng han er, tøver han ikke med at kaste sig hovedkulds ind i kærligheden – heller ikke selvom den slemme pige virker mere og mere slem.Denne roman er Nobelpristageren Mario Vargas Llosas litterære jagt på kærlighedens komplekse, lidenskabelige og mystiske natur og samtidig et overdådigt kulturelt tidsbillede.Den slemme pige udfordrer den pæne dreng, hans konformitet og begrænsede ambitionsniveau, og de to mødes igen og igen med hele verden som scene for deres tragikomiske forestilling. Fra hjemlandet Peru til Paris over London, Tokyo og Madrid.

En ny og revideret udgave af Vargas Llosas storslåede fortælling om den latinamerikanske revolution. En uforglemmelig fortælling om den lidenskab, vold og de ødelæggelser, som fanatisme indebærer.Dybt inde i baglandet ad det nittende århundredes Brasilien ligger Canudos, der er hjemsted for alle fordømte på jorden: prostituerede, banditter, tiggere og udstødte. Et sted, hvor historie og civilisation er udslettet. Der findes ingen penge, ingen beskatning, intet ægteskab, ingen folketælling. Canudos er arnestedet for den revolutionære ånd i sin reneste form, en tilstand med det fulde potentiale til at blive et sandt libertariansk paradis – og et sted, som den brasilianske regering er fast besluttet på at knuse for enhver pris.I sin måske mest ambitiøse og tragiske roman fortæller Mario Vargas Llosa sin egen version af den virkelige historie om Canudos, beboet af folk, som endte på hver sin side af den katastrofale konflikt mellem lokalsamfundet og regeringstropperne. Resultatet er en storslået fortælling om latinamerikansk revolutionær historie, en uforglemmelig fortælling om den lidenskab, vold og de ødelæggelser, som fanatisme indebærer.

Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas. Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct.

The true story of Guatemala's political turmoil of the 1950s as only a master of fiction can tell itGuatemala, 1954. The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo Arbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that Arbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.In this thrilling novel, Mario Vargas Llosa fuses reality with two fictions: that of the narrator, who freely re-creates characters and situations, and the one designed by those who would control the politics and the economy of a continent by manipulating its history.Harsh Times is a gripping, revealing novel that directly confronts recent history. No one is better suited to tell this riveting story than Vargas Llosa, and there is no form better for it than his deeply textured fiction. Not since The Feast of the Goat, his classic novel of the downfall of Trujillo's regime in the Dominican Republic, has Vargas Llosa combined politics, characters, and suspense so unforgettably.

"Velgøreren". Sådan blev han kaldt, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, som i 1930 ved et kup tog magten i Den Dominikanske Republik og fastholdt den i et brutalt jerngreb, indtil han blev myrdet af højtstående officerer i 1961. Romanen foregår i tiden omkring hans død - suppleret med erindringsglimt fra årene forud. "Mario Vargas Llosas roman om den dominikanske diktator Trujillos død er en eksemplarisk fortælling om, hvad rettidig ondskab kan udrette." Lars Bonnevie, Weekendavisen

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREIn a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tomás entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men.Death in the Andes is an atmospheric suspense story and a political allegory, a panoramic view of contemporary Peru from one of the world's great novelists.

Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA New York Times Notable BookFlora Tristán, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty and journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return in 1844, she makes her name as a champion of the downtrodden, touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers' Union. In 1891, Flora's grandson, struggling painter and stubborn visionary Paul Gauguin, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this double portrait, a rare study in passion and ambition, as well as the obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of illness and death.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREWith meticulous observation and the seductive skill of a great storyteller, Vargas Llosa lures the reader into the shadow of perversion that, little by little, darkens the extraordinary happiness and harmony of his characters. The mysterious nature of happiness and above all, the corrupting power of innocence are the themes that underlie these pages, and the author has perfectly met the demands of the erotic novel, never dimming for an instant the fine poetic polish of his writing.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREAt a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man...that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas's transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREDeep within the remote backlands of nineteenth-century Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation, no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian paradise--and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost. In perhaps his most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa tells his own version of the real story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive, cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE In The Feast of the Goat, this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. "A fierce, edgy and enthralling book ... Mr. Vargas Llosa has pushed the boundaries of the traditional historical novel, and in doing so has written a book of harrowing power and lasting resonance."--The New York Times

"Dazzling. . . . An imaginative documentation of nature's sway over man." ?New York Times Book ReviewFrom the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, an important and passionate novel set in Peru, that explores man's struggle with both nature and civilization Vargas Llosa's classic early novel takes place in Puira, a Peruvian town situated between desert and jungle, and which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, thus setting of a chain-reaction with extraordinary consequences. This brothel, called the Green House, brings together the innocent and the corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the nuns only to become a prostitute: Father Garcia, struggling for the church; and four best friends drawn to both excitement and escape. The conflicting forces that haunt the Green House evoke a world balanced between savagery and civilization?and one which is cursed by not being able to discern between the two.