The Storyteller

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.

The Machiguenga

The Machiguenga forest

The people

Deep in the eastern rainforest live the scattered, walking bands of the Machiguenga, a people who keep no fixed home and hold themselves together only through the stories passed among them. Vargas Llosa alternates his narrator's voice with the storyteller's own myths, and roots this vanishing forest world in the real Amazon of south-eastern Peru.

The Machiguenga chapters

inspired by The nomadic Machiguenga of the novel live in the Amazon rainforest along the Urubamba and its tributaries; drawn from that real region of the Peruvian jungle and sited there.

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