09/06/2021
Peruvian Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa (The Neighborhood) spins a complex and mostly propulsive tale of deception, centered on Guatemala’s political strife during the 1950s and ’60s. The Eisenhower administration latches onto a lie about communism taking root in the country via president Jacobo Árbenz, propagated by juggernaut banana importer United Fruit, which faces taxes for the first time under Árbenz’s regime. As part of its containment policy, and hoping to appease the company, the U.S. backs Lt. Col. Carlos Castillo Armas’s successful coup d’état. Once in power, the married Armas takes a lover, Marta Borrero Parra, who advises him and acts as conduit to his ear. Meanwhile, Dominican Johnny Abbes García is sent to Guatemala by his own country’s political leaders, who feel jilted by Armas, to orchestrate Armas’s assassination. Johnny takes a shine to Marta and befriends Armas’s director of security, Enrique Trinidad Oliva, with whom he plans the president’s murder. Vargas Llosa follows this trio up to and beyond Armas’s demise, as Johnny and Marta abscond to the Dominican Republic while Enrique is thrown in prison, and he employs a lovely Rashomon-style narration of Armas’s death through multiple perspectives. The fragmented storytelling leads to unnecessary murkiness at some points, but once the action kicks in, everything falls into place. Vargas Llosa writes with confidence and authority, and overall this hits the mark. (Nov.)
Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times
"Classic Vargas Llosa . . . An unsettling reminder of the complicated relationship between storytelling and politics." —Booklist (Starred Review)
"[A] vivid story centered on the U.S.-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala . . . History here gets a compelling human face through an artist’s dramatic brilliance.” —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"Harsh Times, which covers the same years as The Feast of the Goat, is not so much a sequel to the earlier book as an expansion of it, the new novel interwoven with the previous one, filling in gaps and deepening our understanding . . . Vargas Llosa has constructed a compelling and propulsive literary thriller, deeply informed by his experience as a public intellectual and a practicing politician." —Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review
"As always with Vargas Llosa . . . the political is rendered personal through a cast of vivid, grotesque characters and through a narrative structure that is as complex and labyrinthine as the world it describes . . . It’s not just the subject matter that thrills, though; this is a novel that impresses at sentence level, too . . . [A] wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." —Alex Preston, Financial Times
"From Paul Revere’s ride to the storming of the Bastille to last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, the spirit of revolution has stirred the hearts of those yearning for justice—and yet freedom never comes for free, as the Nobel laureate wrenchingly observes in his intricately plotted new novel . . . Harsh Times explores evergreen themes–skirmishes between the powerful and powerless, how war erodes our humanity—with gallows humor." —Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily
09/01/2021
Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Prize winner and sole survivor of the Boom generation, turns now to Guatemala in this novel about the 1954 CIA-backed coup there that ousted President Árbenz and the assassination of his successor, Castillo Armas, three years later; it's thematically linked with his 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat. The series of alternate narrative sequences, a Vargas Llosa trademark, is glued together by Marta Borrero Parra, President Armas's mistress who escapes under suspicion of complicity in his death. In a metafictional twist in the epilogue, the author interviews Marta, whose discourse casts doubt on the veracity of the events. The fate of others, however, is not so fortunate. The car of the head of Guatemalan security is bombed, and a prominent family is slaughtered by the Tonton Macoute. Vargas Llosa takes a while to get the story going; forward progress often gets bogged down in long sections that read like extracts from a newspaper or a history book. VERDICT The publication of a new work by Vargas Llosa is always a major event, but in this go-round, though treading new territory, he relies too heavily on recycled themes, indistinguishable characterizations, and documentary to carry the weight.—Lawrence Olszewski, formerly at OCLC
★ 2021-08-18
The Peru-born Nobel Prize winner crafts a vivid story centered on the U.S.–backed 1954 coup in Guatemala.
Vargas Llosa turns, after two lighter novels, to a pivotal moment in Latin American political history. He starts with a chapter on the propaganda machine deployed by United Fruit—aka the Octopus—to retain its monopoly and tax-free status in Guatemala. Using stories planted in American media and the support of Washington, the company portrayed the government of Jacobo Árbenz as a seedbed of Soviet communism. Vargas Llosa portrays it as a democratic and progressive administration seeking to distribute land more fairly while reining in the Octopus. In subsequent overlapping narratives, he keeps the historical reality more or less in view while developing characters, scenes, and tension in imagined vignettes—not a historical novel so much as colorized history. A few recurring figures provide helpful landmarks in a busy, time-shifting chronicle. Most impressive of the fictional players is Martita Borrero Parra, who is impregnated by her father’s friend at 14, forced to marry the man, and disowned by papa. She abandons her child a few years later and seeks the protection and bed of Carlos Castillo Armas, the man who led the push to oust Árbenz and replaced him as president. She becomes his secret adviser and remains influential in politics elsewhere after he’s assassinated. The chapters that cover the preparations for that killing and its fallout provide another narrative thread. However much fiction or bias Vargas Llosa has added to the historical record, he makes a persuasive case, supported by West’s lucid translation, that Washington’s big-footing in '54 “held up the continent’s democratization for decades at the cost of thousands of lives.”
History here gets a compelling human face through an artist’s dramatic brilliance.
Ian Guerra masterfully narrates this stunning novel, the latest by Nobel Laureate Vargas Llosa. It is the story of the 1954 American-backed military coup of the democratically elected government of Guatemala, which effectively rendered that small country into a banana republic. Guerra voices the many characters of the novel distinctly—no easy feat. People swing in and out of the action; some, whose stories are well underway, are never heard from again. Guerra begins each new chapter as a deep breath punctuating his reading, helping the listener identify the theme of the novel: A multitude of nameless and voiceless people gave their lives to fight a superpower obsessed by the perceived threats of the Cold War. A masterful performance of a memorable book. D.G.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Ian Guerra masterfully narrates this stunning novel, the latest by Nobel Laureate Vargas Llosa. It is the story of the 1954 American-backed military coup of the democratically elected government of Guatemala, which effectively rendered that small country into a banana republic. Guerra voices the many characters of the novel distinctly—no easy feat. People swing in and out of the action; some, whose stories are well underway, are never heard from again. Guerra begins each new chapter as a deep breath punctuating his reading, helping the listener identify the theme of the novel: A multitude of nameless and voiceless people gave their lives to fight a superpower obsessed by the perceived threats of the Cold War. A masterful performance of a memorable book. D.G.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
