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| Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984 |
All lovers of justice are
invited to attend a public demonstration of solidarity with the idealists of
Canudos and with all rebels the world over,
to be held in the Praça da
Liberdade
on the fourth of October at 6 p.m.
Called a “modern tragedy on
the grand scale,” a “thunderous novel,” a “masterpiece.” THE WAR OF THE END OF
THE WORLD is all that and more.
Canudos is the Wild West and
Neverland all rolled into one. There are no laws, no taxes, no marriage, no
worries. Sounds like paradise, but there is always a snake in the grass, and
this one is the fictional Brazilian government determined to claim the
backlands, crush the outcasts and impose their rule. Freedom fighters or bandits? The battle is inevitable, but readers must
ask, who truly wins the war?
SUMMARY: Deep within the remote backlands of
nineteenth-century Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth:
prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where
history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation,
no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in
its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian
paradise--and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost.
In perhaps his
most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa tells his own version of
the real story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive,
cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting
novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable
story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.
BIO: MARIO VARGAS LLOSA was born in Arequipa,
Peru, in 1936. In 1958 he earned a scholarship to study in Madrid, and later he
lived in Paris. His first story collection, THE CUBS AND OTHER STORIES, was
published in 1959. Vargas Llosa’s reputation grew with the publication in 1963
of THE TIME OF THE HERO, a controversial novel about the politics of his
country. The Peruvian military burned a thousand copies of the book. He
continued to live abroad until 1980, returning to Lima just before the
restoration of democratic rule. In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of his
native Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which
he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, Vargas Llosa was awarded the
Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary
honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose
work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society. His books
include, DEATH IN THE ANDES, THE BAD GIRL, THE WAY TO PARADISE, AUNT JULIA AND
THE SCRIPTWRITER, and IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER. Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 2010.
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