Bøger af Mario Vargas Llosa

Pantaleón Pantoja, un capitán del ejército recientemente ascendido, recibe la misión de establecer un servicio de prostitución para las Fuerzas Armadas del Perú en el más absoluto secreto militar. Estricto cumplidor del deber que le ha sido asignado, Pantaleón se traslada a Iquitos, en plena selva, para llevar a cabo su cometido, pero se entrega a esta misión con tal obcecación que termina por poner en peligro el engranaje que él mismo ha puesto en movimiento. Así arranca esta novela, publicada en 1973 y llevada posteriormente al cine. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Pantaleón Pantoja, a recently promoted army captain, is entrusted with a top-secret mission to establish a prostitution service for the Armed Forces of Peru. As a faithful soldier, Pantaleón transfers to Iquitos in the middle of the jungle, to carry out his mission. His enthusiasm, however, endangers the very scheme he has put in motion. Thus begins this classic in Latin American literature, which was published in 1973 and later made into a film.

From the Nobel Laureate comes a politically charged detective novel weaving through the underbelly of Peruvian privilege, translated by Edith Grossman. 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 exposes. 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 expose 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.

This is an edition of an important early work by a writer who has since become a leading Latin-American author and a figure in Peruvian politics. It provides a picture of the hedonistic and selfish lifestyle of the young men and women who will one day become Peru's ruling elite.

A collection of Vargas Llosa's plays exploring the central theme of his work - how and why stories come into being and the relationship between fact and fiction. Vargas Llosa is the author of the novels "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" and "The War of the End of the World".

Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. This work helps us to appreciate the incredible ambition, power, and beauty of Hugo's masterpiece and, in the process, presents a humane vision of fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine a different and better world.

Felicito Yanaque has raised himself from poverty to ownership of a trucking business. His two sons work for him. He receives a threatening letter demanding protection money. The police don't take him seriously, Felicito refuses to pay up and gets sucked into a nightmare. He becomes a reluctant public hero. Then his mistress is kidnapped, and matters become seriously complicated. And he finds that his troubles have begun very close to home. His fate is interwoven with the story of Rigoberto, a wealthy Lima insurance executive. His boss and old friend, Ismael, suddenly announces that he is marrying his housekeeper, a chola from Piura, to the consternation of his twin sons, a pair of brutal wasters. Ismael escapes to Europe with his new bride, leaving Rigoberto to face the twins' threats, and their claims that he connived with a scheming woman to rob an old man of his fortune. Rigoberto is hounded by the press and TV. Meanwhile, his only son is having visions of a mysterious stranger who may or may not be the devil...

A visitor from Peru, happening upon an exhibition of photographs from the Amazon jungle in an obscure Florentine picture gallery, finds his attention drawn to a picture of a tribal storyteller seated among a circle of Michiguenga Indians. There is something odd about the storyteller. He is too light-skinned to be an Indian. As the visitor stares at the photograph, it dawns on him that he knows this man. The storyteller is his long-lost friend, Saul Zuratas, his classmate from university who was thought to have disappeared in Israel.The Storyteller is a brilliant and compelling study of the world of the primitive and its place in our own modern lives.

In Who Killed Palomino Molero? Mario Vargas LLosa has turned to detective fiction. The setting is Peru in the 1950s. Near an air force base in the northern deserts, a young airman is found brutally tortured and murdered. Two local policemen, Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma, set out to investigate. But they are not glamorous detectives with modern resources at their disposal; they don't even have a squad car and have to hitch rides on chiken trucks and cajole a local cabdriver to take them out to the scene of the crime.Not that anyone seems eager for Silva and Lituma to capture Palomino Molero's killer. But the two policemen persevere, and the slow and haphazard pace of the investigation only serves to intensify the high-pitched narrative tension, as the novel comes to haltingly rest on the very question with which it began. Who killed Palomino Molero? is an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery. It is also serious fiction. Deftly, unobtrusively, the book takes up some of the great themes of all of Vargas Llosa's novels: guilt and innocence, the impossibility of justice in a society grounded in inequality and the eternally elusive nature of the truth.

With 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.

When a master novelist, essayist, and critic searches for the wellsprings of his own work, where does he turn? Mario Vargas Llosa-Peruvian writer, presidential contender, and public intellectual-answers this most personal question with elegant concision in this collection of essays.

Don Rigoberto - a rather grey insurance executive by day, a dedicated pornographer and sexual enthusiast by night - misses Lucrecia, his estranged second wife. He desperately compensates for her absence by filling his notebooks with a steamy mix of memory and sexual fantasy. Husband and wife have been separated for a year because of a sexual encounter between Rigoberto's pre-pubescent son Alfonso and his stepmother. Alfonso is a strange fey creature of angelic appearance and apparently diabolical impulses - more seducer than seduced despite his age. He visits Lucrecia's house without his father's knowledge and insists that he wants his parents to make up, having apparently forgotten the incident that caused the original break-up. Meanwhile, Rigoberto and Lucrecia are each receiving highly erotic letters which each believe to have been sent by the other but may well have been written by Alfonso. Add to all this the notebooks at the core of the novel and the reader is drawn into Don Rigoberto's own confusion between imagination and physical reality. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is a funny, sexy, disquieting and very compelling novel that is one of Vargas Llosa's finest works.

Mario Vargas Llosa's A Fish in the Water is a twofold book: a memoir by one of Latin America's most celebrated writers, beginning with his birth in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru; and the story of his organization of the reform movement which culminated in his bid for the Peruvian presidency in 1990.Llosa evokes the experiences which gave rise to his fiction, and describes the social, literary, and political influences that led him to enter the political arena as a crusader for a free-market economy.A deeply absorbing look at how fact becomes fiction and at the formation of a courageous writer with strong political commitments, A Fish in the Water reveals Mario Vargas Llosa as a world figure whose real story is just beginning.

This 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.

A frightening and impressive portrait of evil by one of Latin America's leading contemporary novelists.'A monumentally engrossing novel.' Los Angeles Times

The Time of the Hero has been acclaimed by critics around the world as one of the outstanding Spanish novels of recent decades. In the author's native Peru, this powerful social satire so outraged the authorities that a thousand copies were publicly burned.The novel is set in Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, where a group of cadets attempt to break out of the vicious round of sadistic ragging, military discipline, confinement and boredom. But their pranks set off a cycle of betrayal, murder and revenge which jeopardizes the entire military hierarchy.'A work of undeniable power and skill.' Sunday Telegraph

The Dream of the Celt explores the life of the Irish revolutionary Sir Roger Casement who was executed for treason after his involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising, travelling with its protagonist from Liverpool and Dublin to the Congo and Peru, where Casement worked as a British consul, and to London, where he ended his life in Pentonville jail.With its preoccupation with political issues and its international scope The Dream of the Celt sits firmly in the tradition of the greatest of Vargas Llosa's work.

In 1844, Flora Tristan embarked on a tour of France to campaign for workers' and women's rights. In 1891, her grandson set sail for Tahiti, determined to escape civilisation and seek out inspiration to paint his primitive masterpieces. Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unravel side by side in this absorbing novel.Flora, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty, and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return, she makes her name as a popular writer and a champion of the dispossessed, setting herself the arduous task of touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers' Union.Paul, struggling, profligate painter and stubborn visionary, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by poverty, syphilis and the stifling forces of French colonialism, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.A rare study of passion, ambition and the determined pursuit of greatness in the face of illness, death and conservative forces, The Way to Paradise shows a contemporary master at the peak of his powers.

Plays by five of the most famous Latin-American authors to have emerged over the last 30 years.

Kelterens drøm starter i dødscellen, hvor den irske frihedskæmper Roger Casement venter svar på sin ansøgning om benådning. Det er afslutningen på et eventyrligt liv, hvor Casement først arbejder sammen med Henry Morton Stanley på at udbrede civilisationen til hjertet af Afrika i Belgisk Congo. Siden bliver han udsendt af den engelske regering for at samle informationer om, hvordan de indfødte stammer langs Congofloden forbløder endnu hurtigere end de gummitræer, der få hjulene til at rulle i Europas industrialisering. Roger Casements næste store opgave bliver en tilsvarende rapport om kautsjukudvindingen og den grusomme udnyttelse af indianerne i Amazonas. Med sine omfattende udredninger lykkes det Casement ene mand at ændre disse sorte kapitler i europæisk historie.Diplomaten Casement blev hyldet som en helt i England og adlet, men samtiden kunne ikke tilgive ham hans seksuelle orientering og heller ikke hans kamp for irsk selvstændighed, der bliver en del af den første verdenskrig. I Kelterens drøm harMario Vargas Llosa flettet Roger Casements modsætningsfyldte liv sammen med den lige så komplekse udvikling i europæisk industrialisering til en stort anlagt romanbiografi. Mario Vargas Llosa fik Nobelprisen i litteratur i 2010.