Library Services: Peru: Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa

Peru's most acclaimed novelist, Vargas Llosa won the prestigous Rómulo Gallegos Prize for literature in Spanish in 1967, ran for President of Peru in 1990, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010.

"Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary." -- Mario Vargas Llosa

Source: Arild Vågen

Daniel Alarcón

Born in Peru, but raised in Birmingham Alabama, "Alarcón inhabits a bridge between the Americas, a place whose denizens are not entirely of one continent or the other. His fiction evokes the dust and grit of urban Peru, conveyed in gracefully nuanced English. He is, as he describes himself, "un norteamerincanco"—a North Amer-Incan—citizen of a highly mutable, interconnected world." (Marie Arana, Crossing the Divide, Smithosonian.com)

Source: Christopher Peterson

Fiction

Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon
Call Number: PQ 8498 A427 2008
ISBN: 9780060594817
Publication Date: 2008-02-05
For ten years Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios--a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio she reads the names of those who have disappeared--those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decadelong bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to change forever--thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband.
The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa; Edith Grossman (Translator)
Call Number: PQ 8498 B2 V278 2007
ISBN: 9780312427764
Publication Date: 2008-10-28
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He lovers her as a coy teeanger known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa; Helen R. Lane (Translator)
Call Number: PQ 8490 A9 V278 2007
ISBN: 9780312427245
Publication Date: 2007-10-02
This masterful, multilayered novel is set in the Lima of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals. This first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane. Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the every-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times.
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
ISBN: 0312427980
Publication Date: 2008-07-22
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.
Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo; Edith Grossman (Translator)
Call Number: PQ 8498 R662 2009
ISBN: 9780307388384
Publication Date: 2010-08-10
A chilling political thriller set at the end of Peru's grim war between Shining Path terrorists and a morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency. Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a by-the-book prosecutor stumbling through life. Two of his greatest pleasures are writing mundane reports and speaking to his long-dead mother. Everything changes, however, when he is asked to investigate a bizarre and brutal murder: the body was found burnt beyond recognition with a cross branded into its forehead. Adhering to standard operating procedures, Chacaltana begins a meticulous investigation, but when everyone he speaks to meets with an unfortunate and untimely end he realizes that his quarry may be much closer to home. With action rising in chorus with Peru's Holy Week, Red April twists and turns, racing toward a riveting conclusion.

Ask Us

JavaScript is required to use this feature.