Conversation in the Cathedral

Over a single four-hour conversation in a grimy Lima bar called La Catedral, the disillusioned journalist Santiago Zavala and his father's old chauffeur Ambrosio reconstruct the corruption of Peru under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. From that table the book fans out across the real city: the university of San Marcos where Santiago is radicalised, the government palace and secret police that run the regime, the wealthy district of Miraflores where the Zavalas live, and the newsroom where Santiago's own compromises are made. Its question hangs over everything: at what moment had Peru screwed itself up?

Ambrosio

La Catedral (the bar)

The conversation

Santiago runs into Ambrosio, once his father's chauffeur, at the dog pound and they end up drinking and talking in the squalid bar La Catedral. Their long conversation is the frame from which the whole tangled history of the Odría years is reconstructed, voice folding into voice across a single table.

Framing conversation

inferred The whole novel is framed by a four-hour talk in a cheap Lima bar called La Catedral, near the city dog pound; the bar is invented and sited in the working districts of the real city.

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