Mapped
Broad and Alien Is the World
Ciro Alegría
The great indigenista novel of the Andes follows the highland Indian community of Rumi, led by the wise old mayor Rosendo Maqui, as a rapacious landowner seizes their communal land and scatters them into a hostile world of mines, plantations and jungle. Alegría maps the real Peruvian sierra and its beyond: the mountain community and its fields, the landowner's hacienda, and the far mines and rubber forests to which the dispossessed are driven, learning how broad and alien the world is for the landless.
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Conversation in the Cathedral
Mario Vargas Llosa
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?
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The Storyteller
Mario Vargas Llosa
A writer, haunted by a photograph glimpsed in Florence, reconstructs the story of his university friend Saúl Zuratas, a marked, Jewish-Peruvian outsider who vanished into the rainforest to become a hablador, a wandering storyteller of the nomadic Machiguenga people. Vargas Llosa maps a real Amazon: the jungle of the Machiguenga along the Urubamba, the mission and oil frontier pressing in on them, and the endless walking by which a people holds itself together through its tales.
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The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa's first novel maps a cruel adolescence onto real ground: the Leoncio Prado military academy on the fog-bound cliffs of La Perla in Callao, and the Lima the cadets slip out to on leave. The map runs from the barracks above the Pacific across the bay to middle-class Miraflores and bohemian Barranco, down to the Costa Verde, and back to the working-class streets of Callao the boys came from.
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