 First Spanish edition (publ. Seix Barral) | |
| Author | Mario Vargas Llosa |
|---|---|
| Original title | La guerra del fin del mundo |
| Translators | Helen R. Lane |
| Genre | Historical fiction |
| Publisher | Seix Barral |
Publication date | October 1, 1981 |
| Award | |
The War of the End of the World (Spanish : La guerra del fin del mundo) is a 1981 novel written by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. [1] It is a fictionalized account of the War of Canudos conflict in late 19th-century Brazil.
In the midst of the economic decline — following drought and the end of slavery — in the province of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil, the poor of the backlands are attracted by the charismatic figure and simple religious teachings of Antonio Conselheiro, called "The Counselor", who preaches that the end of the world is imminent and that the political chaos that surrounds the collapse of the Empire of Brazil and its replacement by a republic is the work of the devil.
Seizing a fazenda in an area blighted by economic decline at Canudos the Counselor's followers build a large town and repeatedly defeat growing military expeditions designed to remove them. As the state's violence against them increases, they too turn increasingly violent, even seizing the modern weapons deployed against them. In an epic final clash, a whole army is sent to extirpate Canudos and instigates a terrible and brutal battle with the poor while politicians of the old order see their world destroyed in the conflagration.
It is generally believed that Vargas Llosa's three milestone novels are La Ciudad y Los Perros ( The Time of the Hero ), La Casa Verde ( The Green House ) and Conversación en la Catedral ( Conversation in the Cathedral )[ citation needed ], though many critics agree that The War of the End of the World should also be included among these three. The author is famously known for considering this his most accomplished novel [2] — an opinion shared by the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño [ citation needed ], as well as the American critic Harold Bloom, who includes the novel in what he calls the "Western canon".
As he did later on with La Fiesta Del Chivo ( The Feast of the Goat ), Vargas Llosa tackles a huge number of characters and stories caught during a time of strife, interweaving these in way that gives us a picture of what it was to live in those times. [3]
| Year | Award | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | PEN Translation Prize for Prose for Helen R. Lane | Winner | [4] |
| 2010 | Nobel Prize in Literature | Winner | [5] [1] |
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and former politician. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He also won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award, the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes International Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie française.
Gregory Rabassa, ComM, was an American literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English. He taught for many years at Columbia University and Queens College.
Euclides da Cunha was a Brazilian journalist, sociologist and engineer. His most important work is Os Sertões, a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos.
The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary is a book-length essay by the Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa which examines Flaubert's 1857 book Madame Bovary as the first modern novel. The first part of Flaubert's novel has an autobiographical tone ; Vargas Llosa then goes on to examine the structure and meaning of Madame Bovary as well as its role in the development of the modern novel. First published in Spanish in 1975, the book was translated into English in 1986 by Helen Lane.
Antônio Conselheiro, in English "Anthony the Counselor", real name Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, was a Brazilian religious leader, preacher and founder of the village of Canudos, the scene of the War of Canudos (1896–1897), a civil rebellion against the central government which was brutally stamped out with the loss of more than 25,000 lives.
Canudos is a municipality in the northeast region of Bahia, Brazil. The original town, since flooded by the Cocorobó Dam, was the scene of violent clashes between peasants and republican police in the 1890s.
The War of Canudos was a conflict between the First Brazilian Republic and the residents of Canudos in the northeastern state of Bahia. It was waged in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1888) and the overthrow of the monarchy (1889). The conflict arose from a millenarian cult led by Antônio Conselheiro, who began attracting attention around 1874 by preaching spiritual salvation to the poor population of the sertão, a region which suffered from severe droughts. Conselheiro and his followers came into attrition with the local authorities after founding the village of Canudos. The situation soon escalated, with Bahia's government requesting assistance from the federal government, who sent military expeditions against the settlement.
The Miguel de Cervantes Prize is awarded annually to honour the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language.
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the international success of the style known as magical realism. As such, the region's literature is often associated solely with this style, with the 20th century literary movement known as Latin American Boom, and with its most famous exponent, Gabriel García Márquez. Latin American literature has a rich and complex tradition of literary production that dates back many centuries.
Os Sertões, translated as Rebellion in the Backlands, is a book written by the Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha. Mixing science and literature, the author narrates the true story of a war that happened at the end of the 19th century in Canudos, a settlement of Bahia's Sertão ("backland"), an extremely arid region where, even now, struggles against poverty, drought and political corruption continue. During the war (1893–1897) against the republican army, the sertanejos were commanded by a messianic leader called Antônio Conselheiro.
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom is most closely associated with Julio Cortázar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. Influenced by European and North American Modernism, but also by the Latin American Vanguardia movement, these writers challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature. Their work is experimental and, owing to the political climate of the Latin America of the 1960s, also very political. "It is no exaggeration", critic Gerald Martin writes, "to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971."
The Storyteller is a novel by Peruvian author and Literature Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. The story tells of Saúl Zuratas, a university student who leaves civilization and becomes a "storyteller" for the Machiguenga Native Americans. The novel thematizes the Westernization of indigenous peoples through missions and through anthropological studies, and questions the perceived notion that indigenous cultures are set in stone.
The Dream of the Celt is a novel written by Peruvian writer and 2010 Nobel laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a Colombian writer, journalist and translator. He has written many novels, short stories, literary essays, and numerous articles of political commentary.
The Blue Hour is a 2005 novel by Peruvian novelist Alonso Cueto. It won the Premio Herralde de Novela for Spanish-language novels in 2006. The English translation, by Frank Wynne, was published in 2012, and won the 2013 Premio Valle-Inclán; it was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in the same year.
The Neighborhood is a 2016 novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. It was published on 3 March 2016 by Alfaguara in Spain, Latin America, and the United States.
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy on 7 October 2010. He is the first Nobel laureate in Literature from Peru and the fifth Latin American to become one after 1982 Colombian laureate Gabriel García Márquez and 1971 Chilean laureate Pablo Neruda.
The 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Trinidadian-born British writer Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932–2018), commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Committee added: "Naipaul is a modern philosopher carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad:
Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.
João Abade was one of the guerrilla leaders during the War of Canudos. He is considered to have been one of the most important leaders of the rebels in the war.
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