Vargas Llosa, Trujillo, and la fiesta del chivo Why Does A Peruvian Novelist Turn To THE Dominican Republic?

Vargas Llosa had previously gone outside Peru at times for settings, most notably in the acclaimed War of The End of the World (191(which his set in the backlands of Brazil, and closely modeled on a precursor text, Euclides da Cunhas Os sertoes. Vargas Llosa is at once a national novelistnational enough ot have run for the Presidency of Peruand an international novelist who has a broad concern for the Western world as a whole, of which he sees Latin America as a crucial part. Yet there is something about the Dominican Republic as a setting, which particularly attracted Vargas Llosa. Even though the differences, topographical and cultural, between the Andean and Caribbean regions might seem tremendous, aspects of the cultural mix are similar.

This admission of Africa in Peruvian national discourse has a long heritage, going back to the nineteenth-century essayist and cultural critic Ricardo Palma, to whom has been attributed the saying el que no tiene de inga tiene de mandinga. Also there were threats to re-annex both Peru and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s by Spain, anxious about debts owed it. It is a little known fact on this 150th anniversary month of the Gettysburg Address, including the shall not perish from the earth clause, pointed towards the French invasion of Mexico which, combined with the Confederate attempt to permanently intuitionalist slavery and the Spanish effort sot collect Peruvian and Dominican debt, More deeply, both countries combined proud literary and cultural traditions with a history of dictatorship. Both also had territorial resentments (Peru lost land ot Chile in the War of the pacific, Dominican Republic resented the very existence of Haiti, and prejudice against Haitians is still the backbone of Dominican nationalism in many ways). Vargas Llosa lived in his youth under the Odria dictatorship, a pretty conventional center-right military dictatorship, and then saw Peru, in his thirties and forties, is ruled by the leftist military dictatorship of Juan Velasco Alvarado and Francisco Morales Bermudez. Trujillo fell somewhere between the two, with his half mystical, half-bureaucratic authoritarianism. Uraniateam, memory; detached intellectually; sexual victimization. Astronomythe stars survive, the stars judge. Balaguer: bureaucratic cunning, as opposed to Trujillo, father of meringue music there is no music to Balaguer. Twinned as survivors.

Hotel Jaragualiminal zone, both national and international, like the novel.