"A Study Guide for Mario Vargas Llosa's ""The War of the End of the World"""

By Gale and Cengage

"A Study Guide for Mario Vargas Llosa's ""The War of the End of the World"", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Dec 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780028665986

Book preview

18

A Study Guide for Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World

Mario Vargas Llosa

1981

Introduction

The Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (1981; English translation, 1984) is an epic novel based on a historical peasant revolt in Brazil in the 1890s. This uprising at the village of Canudos was led by a religious figure, Antônio the Counselor, who preached that his movement signaled the end of the world and the return of Jesus in the year 1900 (hence the novel's title). Vargas Llosa is a member of the Boom generation of Latin American authors, and his novel has the surface of an adventure tale, with numerous battles and blood feuds over affairs of honor, but uses its historical setting to speak to Latin American politics at the time of its composition in the 1970s. Some characters and trends in the novel stand for the fascism that was a major force in Latin America, such as in the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the Peronist dictatorship in Argentina. Other characters and movements stand for the opposite political pole, marked by the liberation theology movement within the Catholic Church and other left-wing movements that sought social and economic justice for the poor. Vargas Llosa appears to advocate a middle way between these two extremes, an economic neoliberalism modeled after the United States and western Europe.

Author Biography

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, Peru. His parents were already separated because his father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, was having an affair, and they were soon divorced. Vargas Llosa lived with his mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, and her more aristocratic family. He spent much of his childhood in Bolivia, where his grandfather was the Peruvian consul. Divorce was so shameful in Catholic Peru at the time that Vargas Llosa's mother allowed her son to believe for many years that his father had died. When he was a teenager, however, his parents reconciled, and he lived with them in Lima. He attended the Prado Military Academy for two years but finished at a public high school. He began working as a newspaper reporter when he was sixteen.

Vargas Llosa began to publish short stories while he was in college. In 1963 he published his first novel, The Time of the Hero, which takes place at a military school based on his own experience. It is highly critical of the military establishment and already involved Vargas Llosa in political controversy with the right wing. His 1966 novel The Green House (about a brothel) was recognized as an artistically important work and identified Vargas Llosa with the Boom, the new wave of Latin American literature of the 1960s. In 1971 Vargas Llosa completed a PhD dissertation at the Complutense University of Madrid, producing the book García Márquez: Story of a Deicide, a satirical attack against the Nobel laureate novelist. This ended the previously close friendship between the two men; when they met again in Mexico City in 1976, they engaged in a fistfight. The