Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize victory in 2010 has inspired great expectations of his latest novel, which hit bookstores last year. Few young writers display the vitality of the veteran author of La ciudad y los perros (published in English as The Time of the Hero) and Pantaleón y las visitadoras ( Captain Pantoja and the Special Service). And his writing conveys such a strong desire to dig up and explore new stories that it would be easy to forget that this author is now 74 years old. Unlike other authors who plagiarize themselves again and again, Vargas Llosa seems to seek out new horizons, both thematic and stylistic. Out of his journeys to the Belgian Congo and the South American Amazon came two memorable chronicles that shocked the society of his time. He was one of the first Europeans to denounce the horrors of colonialism. Hero and villain, traitor and liberator, moral and immoral, this multifaceted figure was extinguished and reborn after his death. It recounts the life’s journey of a legendary individual: the Irishman Roger Casement. The adventure narrated in El sueño del celta (The Dream of the Celt) begins in the Congo in 1903 and ends in a jail in London one morning in 1916. Lima, 2010 (English translation scheduled for publication in 2012)
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