Conversation in the Cathedral
by Mario Vargas Llosa
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A Haunting tale of power, corruption, and the complex search for identity Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town. Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa show more analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis, Conversation in The Cathedral is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation. show lessTags
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I must admit that I got off to a rocky start with Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral: after a dachshund is brutally clubbed to death in Chapter One* and a woman gets drugged and sexually assaulted in Chapter Two (by, moreover, sympathetic characters who don't ever seem quite to grasp the offensiveness of their actions), I was feeling a mite unfriendly toward the novel. By Chapter Three, though, I was reluctantly softening my stance, and by Chapter Four I was fully immersed in Vargas Llosa's unusual but compelling narrative voice. What won me over? It certainly wasn't a cessation of the brutality in this tale of disillusionment and corruption in 1950s Peru, although the sexual politics did redeem themselves somewhat. What show more really tipped the scales and had me devouring Vargas Llosa's novel in 100-page chunks was its unique combination of compelling storyline and experimental narration style. Vargas Llosa does something with his storytelling here that I've never exactly encountered before, and it's a technique I found both exciting and effective.
Like many novels in which the main character(s) are looking back and attempting to untangle events of the past, Conversation in the Cathedral is multi-layered in its presentation. Within the first chapter we get a sketch of everything that happens in the book's present day (early 1960s): disillusioned newspaper columnist Santiago Zavala goes to fetch his dog at the pound, encounters an older man named Ambrosio who once worked for Santiago's father, and the two go for an extended talking-and-drinking session in a nearby dive bar. At the end of Chapter One, Santiago, now falling-down drunk, initiates an angry confrontation with Ambrosio about some event in their mutual past, but Ambrosio denies responsibility. Santiago then stumbles home with his dog, and promises his wife that he won't stay out drinking without calling her again.
That's the extent of the present-day action, which is over in the first 20 pages. Throughout the rest of the 600-page novel, we get multi-layered, multi-voiced flashbacks reaching back to the years before dictator Manuel Odria's 1948 rise to power, when Santiago was an idealistic, upper-middle-class high school student preparing to enter San Marcos University. Gradually, of course, the reader begins to piece together the relationships surrounding Santiago and Ambrosio, and just what happened to cause the dynamics seen in the opening chapter. What sets Conversation in the Cathedral apart from most other flashback-to-the-past, multiple-voiced novels I've read is that any given passage, from one sentence to the next, can see-saw among three or four different scenes, taking place not just between different sets of people but at radically different times. The result is a sometimes-challenging but always compelling juxtaposition. In extreme cases, Vargas Llosa's technique can look like the following passage, which features four different scenes layered on top of each other: Santiago and Ambrosio's rehashing of the past in the present-day Cathedral bar; an early-1950 political rally in support of the Odríist candidate Emilio Arévalo, staffed by strong-man Trifulcio; a mid-1950 conversation among the now-Senator Arévalo, Senator Landa, and Santiago's father Don Fermín about the rigging of the recent elections and the increasing political power of Presidential favorite Cayo Bermúdez; and a police "interrogation" carried out by two of Ambrosio's sometime-colleagues, hired thugs Hipólito and Ludovico, sometime in the early 1950s.
I know this is a very extended quote, but it takes some time to get into the swing of what Vargas Llosa can do with this kind of staggered, syncopated dialogue. Like a choreographer working with four groups of dancers on stage simultaneously, he subtly shifts the focus from one to another of the four scenes, while still keeping all of them in motion at once. Even in the (relatively) short segment above, one can see the focus shifting slightly from Santiago/Ambrosio to the conversation among the senators and back again, like the intermittent interference that happens when a listener drives along the boundary between two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency.
Together, these four threads become more than the sum of their parts: not only is there an aesthetically affecting rhythm to their interplay, but the immediate juxtaposition of different characters and times is an interesting way to bring out the novel's themes. Here, for example, we have two competing analyses of the political events: on one station, there is Santiago's disgust with his father's opportunism and with his own youthful self-righteousness; while on the other, we get Don Fermín's self-interested but pragmatic play-by-play assessment of the unfolding political scene. At the same time, like palimpsests over which these conversations are layered, are the two scenes of action, of real-life cause and effect, which I visualize as sandwiching the senators' conversation: the lead-up to the elections they're discussing, and the stark reality of police brutality and oppression under the Odría regime.
So too, we get the juxtaposition of two father/son pairs: Trifulcio the thug is Ambrosio's father, so a second filial dynamic is present, echoing the dominant theme established by Santiago and Don Fermín. Conversation in the Cathedral has much interesting commentary to offer on the class dynamics of Peruvian society, and we can see some of that coming out here: Santiago, with the bourgeois background he spends the entire novel trying to escape, has nonetheless the privileged person's sense of entitlement: he feels betrayed by the person he has discovered his father to be, and he holds that against the man's memory because he feels he somehow "deserves" a father different from the one he got. Ambrosio, on the other hand, is remarkably free from bitterness, despite Trifulcio being a much more negligent and immoral father to him than Don Fermín was to Santiago. (Santiago's statement that his father "didn't have any political ideas, only political interests" is ironic given how much truer it is when applied to Ambrosio's father rather than his own.)
Moreover, throughout their entire conversation, Ambrosio reinforces rather than questions the emphasis on the Santiago/Don Fermín relationship: while the two bar patrons discuss both their lives, Ambrosio seems to have had more of a relationship with Santiago's father than he had with Trifulcio, and is invested in defending his former employer to the man's son. This continues to be true despite a number of narrative reveals later in the book (the circumstances of Trifulcio's eventual death; details about the dynamic between Don Fermín and Ambrosio) which might lead a reader to assume Ambrosio would have his own axe to grind with Don Fermín. Ambrosio, though, has been trained not to question his own status as a secondary player on the stage of life; he doesn't believe he deserves any particular treatment or quality of life. These issues of class hierarchy and feelings of entitlement are in turn reflected in the senators' discussion of the commoner Cayo Bermúdez, whose social standing earns their contempt but whose influential role in the President's inner circle commands their fear and respect. Meanwhile, on the other ends of the class and paternity spectrums, menial laborer Trinidad López is being beaten to death by Odría's and Bermúdez's goons just as he is about to become a father himself.
Obviously, it would be easy to write about Conversation in the Cathedral all night: its epic scope and unusual presentation make for a rich, thought-provoking ride. Long story short, I'm glad my reading buddies provided me with the motivation to stick with this book through the initial off-putting chapters, since Vargas Llosa's overall humanity and impressive writing chops more than made up for them in the end.
*******
*I admit to being a little over-sensitive to the issue of animal brutality, particularly since my dog happens also to be a dachshund and a former stray just like the one that gets clubbed to death in Chapter One of Conversation in the Cathedral. Graphic cruelty toward animals is a huge turnoff for me, even if it's a realistic depiction intended to demonstrate the desperation of the people perpetrating said cruelty. To be fair, I believe this scene has a valid rationale behind it: it shows in a visceral way that Ambrosio has fallen to the bottom of the employment barrel, and has to choose between starvation and doing a job that's horrific and dehumanizing. As we find out later, Ambrosio doesn't even seem to believe that he deserves control over his own life or body; he can't be expected to believe in that right when applied to a dog. Still, it was upsetting to me out of proportion with what I believe Vargas Llosa intended. Which is a little bit funny considering that Ambrosio also works as a thug beating up humans, and that doesn't bother me at all. I suppose we all have our triggers. show less
Like many novels in which the main character(s) are looking back and attempting to untangle events of the past, Conversation in the Cathedral is multi-layered in its presentation. Within the first chapter we get a sketch of everything that happens in the book's present day (early 1960s): disillusioned newspaper columnist Santiago Zavala goes to fetch his dog at the pound, encounters an older man named Ambrosio who once worked for Santiago's father, and the two go for an extended talking-and-drinking session in a nearby dive bar. At the end of Chapter One, Santiago, now falling-down drunk, initiates an angry confrontation with Ambrosio about some event in their mutual past, but Ambrosio denies responsibility. Santiago then stumbles home with his dog, and promises his wife that he won't stay out drinking without calling her again.
That's the extent of the present-day action, which is over in the first 20 pages. Throughout the rest of the 600-page novel, we get multi-layered, multi-voiced flashbacks reaching back to the years before dictator Manuel Odria's 1948 rise to power, when Santiago was an idealistic, upper-middle-class high school student preparing to enter San Marcos University. Gradually, of course, the reader begins to piece together the relationships surrounding Santiago and Ambrosio, and just what happened to cause the dynamics seen in the opening chapter. What sets Conversation in the Cathedral apart from most other flashback-to-the-past, multiple-voiced novels I've read is that any given passage, from one sentence to the next, can see-saw among three or four different scenes, taking place not just between different sets of people but at radically different times. The result is a sometimes-challenging but always compelling juxtaposition. In extreme cases, Vargas Llosa's technique can look like the following passage, which features four different scenes layered on top of each other: Santiago and Ambrosio's rehashing of the past in the present-day Cathedral bar; an early-1950 political rally in support of the Odríist candidate Emilio Arévalo, staffed by strong-man Trifulcio; a mid-1950 conversation among the now-Senator Arévalo, Senator Landa, and Santiago's father Don Fermín about the rigging of the recent elections and the increasing political power of Presidential favorite Cayo Bermúdez; and a police "interrogation" carried out by two of Ambrosio's sometime-colleagues, hired thugs Hipólito and Ludovico, sometime in the early 1950s.
"I'm not being nosy, but why did you run away from home that time, son?" Ambrosio asks. "Weren't you well off at home with your folks?"
Don Emilio Arévalo was sweating; he was shaking the hands that converged on him from all sides, he wiped his forehead, smiled, waved, embraced the people on the platform, and the wooden frame swayed as Don Emilio approached the steps. Now it was your turn, Trifulcio.
"Too well off, that's why I left," Santiago says. "I was so pure and thick-headed that it bothered me having such an easy life and being a nice young boy.
"The funny thing is that the idea of putting him in jail didn't come from the Uplander," Don Fermín said. "Or from Arbeláez or Ferro. The one who convinced them, the one who insisted was Bermúdez."
"So pure and thick-headed that I thought that by fucking myself up a little I would make myself a real little man, Ambrosio," Santiago says.
"That all of it was the work of an insignificant Director of Public Order, an underling, I can't swallow either," Senator Landa said. "Uplander Espina invented it so he could toss the ball to someone else if things turned out badly."
Trifulcio was there, at the foot of the stairs, defending his place with his elbows, spitting on his hands, his gaze fanatically fastened on Don Emilio's feet, which were approaching, mixed in with others, his body tense, his feet firmly planted on the ground: his turn, it was his turn.
"You have to believe it because it's the truth," Don Fermín said. "And don't tar him so much. Whether you like it or not, that underling is becoming the man the General trusts the most."
"There he is, Hipólito, I'm making a present of him to you," Ludovico said. "Get those ideas of being headman out of his brain once and for all."
"Then it wasn't because you had different political ideas from your papa?" Ambrosio asks.
"He believes him implicitly, he thinks he's infallible," Don Fermín said. "When Bermúdez has an opinion, Ferro, Arbeláez, Espina and even I can go to the devil, we don't exist. That was evident in the Montagne affair."
"My poor old man didn't have any political ideas," Santiago says. "Only political interests, Ambrosio."
I know this is a very extended quote, but it takes some time to get into the swing of what Vargas Llosa can do with this kind of staggered, syncopated dialogue. Like a choreographer working with four groups of dancers on stage simultaneously, he subtly shifts the focus from one to another of the four scenes, while still keeping all of them in motion at once. Even in the (relatively) short segment above, one can see the focus shifting slightly from Santiago/Ambrosio to the conversation among the senators and back again, like the intermittent interference that happens when a listener drives along the boundary between two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency.
Together, these four threads become more than the sum of their parts: not only is there an aesthetically affecting rhythm to their interplay, but the immediate juxtaposition of different characters and times is an interesting way to bring out the novel's themes. Here, for example, we have two competing analyses of the political events: on one station, there is Santiago's disgust with his father's opportunism and with his own youthful self-righteousness; while on the other, we get Don Fermín's self-interested but pragmatic play-by-play assessment of the unfolding political scene. At the same time, like palimpsests over which these conversations are layered, are the two scenes of action, of real-life cause and effect, which I visualize as sandwiching the senators' conversation: the lead-up to the elections they're discussing, and the stark reality of police brutality and oppression under the Odría regime.
So too, we get the juxtaposition of two father/son pairs: Trifulcio the thug is Ambrosio's father, so a second filial dynamic is present, echoing the dominant theme established by Santiago and Don Fermín. Conversation in the Cathedral has much interesting commentary to offer on the class dynamics of Peruvian society, and we can see some of that coming out here: Santiago, with the bourgeois background he spends the entire novel trying to escape, has nonetheless the privileged person's sense of entitlement: he feels betrayed by the person he has discovered his father to be, and he holds that against the man's memory because he feels he somehow "deserves" a father different from the one he got. Ambrosio, on the other hand, is remarkably free from bitterness, despite Trifulcio being a much more negligent and immoral father to him than Don Fermín was to Santiago. (Santiago's statement that his father "didn't have any political ideas, only political interests" is ironic given how much truer it is when applied to Ambrosio's father rather than his own.)
Moreover, throughout their entire conversation, Ambrosio reinforces rather than questions the emphasis on the Santiago/Don Fermín relationship: while the two bar patrons discuss both their lives, Ambrosio seems to have had more of a relationship with Santiago's father than he had with Trifulcio, and is invested in defending his former employer to the man's son. This continues to be true despite a number of narrative reveals later in the book (the circumstances of Trifulcio's eventual death; details about the dynamic between Don Fermín and Ambrosio) which might lead a reader to assume Ambrosio would have his own axe to grind with Don Fermín. Ambrosio, though, has been trained not to question his own status as a secondary player on the stage of life; he doesn't believe he deserves any particular treatment or quality of life. These issues of class hierarchy and feelings of entitlement are in turn reflected in the senators' discussion of the commoner Cayo Bermúdez, whose social standing earns their contempt but whose influential role in the President's inner circle commands their fear and respect. Meanwhile, on the other ends of the class and paternity spectrums, menial laborer Trinidad López is being beaten to death by Odría's and Bermúdez's goons just as he is about to become a father himself.
Obviously, it would be easy to write about Conversation in the Cathedral all night: its epic scope and unusual presentation make for a rich, thought-provoking ride. Long story short, I'm glad my reading buddies provided me with the motivation to stick with this book through the initial off-putting chapters, since Vargas Llosa's overall humanity and impressive writing chops more than made up for them in the end.
*******
*I admit to being a little over-sensitive to the issue of animal brutality, particularly since my dog happens also to be a dachshund and a former stray just like the one that gets clubbed to death in Chapter One of Conversation in the Cathedral. Graphic cruelty toward animals is a huge turnoff for me, even if it's a realistic depiction intended to demonstrate the desperation of the people perpetrating said cruelty. To be fair, I believe this scene has a valid rationale behind it: it shows in a visceral way that Ambrosio has fallen to the bottom of the employment barrel, and has to choose between starvation and doing a job that's horrific and dehumanizing. As we find out later, Ambrosio doesn't even seem to believe that he deserves control over his own life or body; he can't be expected to believe in that right when applied to a dog. Still, it was upsetting to me out of proportion with what I believe Vargas Llosa intended. Which is a little bit funny considering that Ambrosio also works as a thug beating up humans, and that doesn't bother me at all. I suppose we all have our triggers. show less
Manuel Odría ruled Peru from 1948 until 1956. His dictatorship was deeply corrupt. His Minister of Internal Affairs, for instance, ran a brothel. That the cabron in charge of internal affairs should run a prostitution ring is, like a death-row guard named Mort, almost unbearably ironic. In this case, it’s true. Politicians and industrialists performed perverse acts and whispered state secrets to the prostitutes, giving the Minster, and Odría, leverage on all sorts of situations and people.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s sweeping novel is a history of Peru and Latin American dictatorships told in a Joycean late-1960s conversation in a bar known as The Cathedral. Santiago is the son of an influential politician who, like so many idealistic show more young people in the ’60s, has rejected his father’s corrupt if pragmatic world. Santiago is a minor editorial-page journalist. One afternoon, at the insistence of his wife, he goes in search of the family dog. Dogs were being picked up as strays, even if they weren’t, because the dogcatchers got paid per animal. At the pound Santiago runs into his father’s now-aging chauffeur, Ambrosio.
Santiago and Ambrosio strike up a conversation at The Cathedral. The subject of their long conversation is the 16-year dictatorship of Odría, as Santiago is after the truth about his father’s involvement in a notorious murder if that era. If, in Ulysses, James Joyce managed to give a political history of Ireland in a single 1904 day’s perambulations, Llosa managed a political history of an entire continent in an afternoon’s conversation. Where Joyce’s masterpiece is full of modernist tricks and the rejection of naturalism, Llosa’s is less flashy, and he is, arguably, the better novelist. He manages to include a vast panoply of characters remembered, either directly or through various media, by Santiago and Ambrosio. The effect is truly cathedral-like, echoing and resonating with the voices of the dead, the broken and the until-now forgotten.
Conversation in the Cathedral was originally published in 1969, when Llosa was 33, and translated into English in 1975. Llosa called it an attempt at a “total novel”: the complete fictionalization of an entire society. Llosa may be, and indeed has been, criticized for his political beliefs (he was a staunch supporter of neoliberlism and admired Margaret Thatcher, for instance; this may well be why he hasn’t won the Nobel, despite being short-listed any number of times), but there is no doubt that he has long been one of the great craftsmen of the long-fiction form. In Conversation, he never drops a stitch, building and maintaining suspense on a monumental scale.
[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book] show less
Mario Vargas Llosa’s sweeping novel is a history of Peru and Latin American dictatorships told in a Joycean late-1960s conversation in a bar known as The Cathedral. Santiago is the son of an influential politician who, like so many idealistic show more young people in the ’60s, has rejected his father’s corrupt if pragmatic world. Santiago is a minor editorial-page journalist. One afternoon, at the insistence of his wife, he goes in search of the family dog. Dogs were being picked up as strays, even if they weren’t, because the dogcatchers got paid per animal. At the pound Santiago runs into his father’s now-aging chauffeur, Ambrosio.
Santiago and Ambrosio strike up a conversation at The Cathedral. The subject of their long conversation is the 16-year dictatorship of Odría, as Santiago is after the truth about his father’s involvement in a notorious murder if that era. If, in Ulysses, James Joyce managed to give a political history of Ireland in a single 1904 day’s perambulations, Llosa managed a political history of an entire continent in an afternoon’s conversation. Where Joyce’s masterpiece is full of modernist tricks and the rejection of naturalism, Llosa’s is less flashy, and he is, arguably, the better novelist. He manages to include a vast panoply of characters remembered, either directly or through various media, by Santiago and Ambrosio. The effect is truly cathedral-like, echoing and resonating with the voices of the dead, the broken and the until-now forgotten.
Conversation in the Cathedral was originally published in 1969, when Llosa was 33, and translated into English in 1975. Llosa called it an attempt at a “total novel”: the complete fictionalization of an entire society. Llosa may be, and indeed has been, criticized for his political beliefs (he was a staunch supporter of neoliberlism and admired Margaret Thatcher, for instance; this may well be why he hasn’t won the Nobel, despite being short-listed any number of times), but there is no doubt that he has long been one of the great craftsmen of the long-fiction form. In Conversation, he never drops a stitch, building and maintaining suspense on a monumental scale.
[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book] show less
One afternoon in the late 1960s somewhere in the streets of Lima, Santiago, goes out in search of the family dog. At the pound, he meets the aging Ambrosio, his father's former chauffeur, whom he has not seen for 15 years. Later, in a lengthy conversation over beers, Santiago and Ambrosio talk of their lives under the Odria dictatorship two decades earlier.
Santiago is a journalist in a small paper, the son of an influential politician, an idealist who has rejected his social position by embracing an alternative way of life. When Santiago cut his ties with family years ago, many questions were left unanswered, some of them he didn't dare even seek answers to. He tried to eke out a living, found a wife, and fought to get the next story show more out. This was his life now. The meeting with Ambrosio turns into an intense examination of those years when decisions and acts of people very close to them, and by their own response, would scar and torment them slowly over time. Secrets, a complex web of intrigues, scandals and crimes, repression, were necessary to maintain a "stable" society. Even then, there was an imminent sense of degradation and frustration. Not just a historical narrative, the novel is as much a political and social critique.
The complexity of their stories which detail the corruption and perversions of the few individuals who kept the machinery of the dictatorship oiled and running, is further emphasized by Vargas Llosa's narrative style. Most of this immense book (600+ pages) is composed of snatches of several events or dialogues, happening in different timeframes, interlaced at the level of the sentence. They are stories within the big story, and dialogues within the big dialogue.
Though at times I felt it dragging, overall, the novel is brilliant and Vargas Llosa here is most impressive. Compared with several of his other books which I've read, this is easily his best. And definitely one of the best novels that have come out of Latin America. Highly recommended, of course. show less
Santiago is a journalist in a small paper, the son of an influential politician, an idealist who has rejected his social position by embracing an alternative way of life. When Santiago cut his ties with family years ago, many questions were left unanswered, some of them he didn't dare even seek answers to. He tried to eke out a living, found a wife, and fought to get the next story show more out. This was his life now. The meeting with Ambrosio turns into an intense examination of those years when decisions and acts of people very close to them, and by their own response, would scar and torment them slowly over time. Secrets, a complex web of intrigues, scandals and crimes, repression, were necessary to maintain a "stable" society. Even then, there was an imminent sense of degradation and frustration. Not just a historical narrative, the novel is as much a political and social critique.
The complexity of their stories which detail the corruption and perversions of the few individuals who kept the machinery of the dictatorship oiled and running, is further emphasized by Vargas Llosa's narrative style. Most of this immense book (600+ pages) is composed of snatches of several events or dialogues, happening in different timeframes, interlaced at the level of the sentence. They are stories within the big story, and dialogues within the big dialogue.
Though at times I felt it dragging, overall, the novel is brilliant and Vargas Llosa here is most impressive. Compared with several of his other books which I've read, this is easily his best. And definitely one of the best novels that have come out of Latin America. Highly recommended, of course. show less
Conversation in the Cathedral is a terrific book. Lest anyone be put off with the prospect of a lengthy religious conversation in a place of worship, the "Cathedral" is La Catedral, a rundown, dingy bar where Santiago has a long talk with Ambrosio, a black man who once worked as a chauffeur for Santiago's father. Through the book we learn of Santiago's turbulent relations with his family (mother, father, brother and sister) and of Ambrosio's own very different life. When they meet in La Catedral, Santiago is married and has been working for some years as a reporter for a tabloid newspaper (having much earlier given up university much to the chagrin of his father) and Ambrosio is down on his luck, working in a stinking dog pound where show more unwanted animals are trussed up in sacks and beaten to death. Elements of the conversation are interspersed throughout the book as various events are recounted.
The book is a story about the rise and fall, the twists and turns of political and social power, about pervasive and specific corruption, about personal freedom and the violence of politics and life in Peru in the 1950s during the dictatorship of Manuel Odria, about the corruption of lives that collapse once the ephemera of money and power and influence disappear, about a search for identity and the entanglements of personal and family relations and pressures, about love found quietly and unostentatiously, about respect and honour even within a maelstrom of conflicting passions, about how different people deal with society and the pressures it brings to bear, and about how no matter how much you think you know a person, you can never know everything and there may be dark and seemingly inexplicable sides.
Not only does the book have a large canvas of characters and actions, Llosa's style of writing is unique and quite wonderful. Whole chapters of conversations and descriptions switch back and forth changing characters, time, place and perspective. At first I found it disconcerting, not helped when the same character can be called different names (e.g. a nickname, the family name, the first name), but once you catch the rhythm, the effect is terrific. There is no linear progression, or very little of it. Llosa collapses space and time and creates a sense of the simultaneity of life whereby different people are discussing, or acting upon, or considering the same event or action but from very different perspectives, or you see the results of an action or event before you understand the causes, again often through varying perspectives. This greatly enriches an already wonderful story.
I would highly recommend this book. show less
The book is a story about the rise and fall, the twists and turns of political and social power, about pervasive and specific corruption, about personal freedom and the violence of politics and life in Peru in the 1950s during the dictatorship of Manuel Odria, about the corruption of lives that collapse once the ephemera of money and power and influence disappear, about a search for identity and the entanglements of personal and family relations and pressures, about love found quietly and unostentatiously, about respect and honour even within a maelstrom of conflicting passions, about how different people deal with society and the pressures it brings to bear, and about how no matter how much you think you know a person, you can never know everything and there may be dark and seemingly inexplicable sides.
Not only does the book have a large canvas of characters and actions, Llosa's style of writing is unique and quite wonderful. Whole chapters of conversations and descriptions switch back and forth changing characters, time, place and perspective. At first I found it disconcerting, not helped when the same character can be called different names (e.g. a nickname, the family name, the first name), but once you catch the rhythm, the effect is terrific. There is no linear progression, or very little of it. Llosa collapses space and time and creates a sense of the simultaneity of life whereby different people are discussing, or acting upon, or considering the same event or action but from very different perspectives, or you see the results of an action or event before you understand the causes, again often through varying perspectives. This greatly enriches an already wonderful story.
I would highly recommend this book. show less
Santiago Zavala is the 30 year old son of a powerful Peruvian senator, who is estranged from his upper middle class family and eking out a meager existence as a investigational journalist in Lima. One day during an afternoon siesta his wife tells him that two black men snatched her beloved dog out of her arms, and he goes to the nearest pound to look for the animal. He finds the dog, and one of the men who took it is also there. Santiago quickly recognizes this man as his father's former chauffeur Ambrosio, who has obviously fallen on hard times. Ambrosio takes him to a local dive, La Catedral, where they reminisce about their former lives over the remainder of the afternoon.
The conversation is interspersed with other conversations that show more take place a few years before, during the dictatorial presidency of Manuel Odría (1948-56). Ambrosio was also formerly employed by the despicable and cunning Don Cayo Bermúdez, who was Odría's Director of Security and Minister for Public Order and the enemy of the senator. Santiago had previously learned that Ambrosio had been accused of the brutal murder of Bermúdez's mistress while he worked for Senatory Zavala, but Ambrosio reveals much more unsavory information about himself, the senator and Bermúdez, and the extent of the depravity of the Odría regime.
Llosa gives us an unsettling and unforgettable view of the effect of dictatorship and corruption on individuals of all levels of Peruvian society during and after Odría. All are adversely affected, even Bermúdez, who profits more than anyone from the regime.
This book was not an easy read, particularly in its first half, as the different conversations are woven together at times, which requires close attention and occasional review of previous pages or chapters. I'd encourage anyone who reads this book to be aware of this in advance, as lriley did in his review, and to stick with it, as most of the latter half in the book does not use this technique, making for a faster read. show less
The conversation is interspersed with other conversations that show more take place a few years before, during the dictatorial presidency of Manuel Odría (1948-56). Ambrosio was also formerly employed by the despicable and cunning Don Cayo Bermúdez, who was Odría's Director of Security and Minister for Public Order and the enemy of the senator. Santiago had previously learned that Ambrosio had been accused of the brutal murder of Bermúdez's mistress while he worked for Senatory Zavala, but Ambrosio reveals much more unsavory information about himself, the senator and Bermúdez, and the extent of the depravity of the Odría regime.
Llosa gives us an unsettling and unforgettable view of the effect of dictatorship and corruption on individuals of all levels of Peruvian society during and after Odría. All are adversely affected, even Bermúdez, who profits more than anyone from the regime.
This book was not an easy read, particularly in its first half, as the different conversations are woven together at times, which requires close attention and occasional review of previous pages or chapters. I'd encourage anyone who reads this book to be aware of this in advance, as lriley did in his review, and to stick with it, as most of the latter half in the book does not use this technique, making for a faster read. show less
I have been eager to read this book, which I've owned for many years, since reading The War of the End of the World last year and since it has been highly praised here on LT. The Cathedral is a run-down bar in Lima, Peru, where a 30-ish journalist, Santiago Zavala, who turned against his rich and well-connected family, and a desperately poor man who once worked for the family as a chauffeur, Ambrosio, reconnect. In the course of their afternoon over beers, their personal stories emerge, always in the context of the brutal dictatorship of General Odría and his scheming, ruthless, and nasty director of security, Don Cayo. This is a book about dictatorship, secrets, class, race, money, power and powerlessness, and love.
The beginning show more section of the novel is very dense and requires extremely careful reading and rereading because the conversation between Santiago and Zavala is interspersed with other conversations between a whole host of other characters, but they are often "conversations" in name only since one person will say something on one page and the response to it may be several pages later, with various other stories happening in between. Additionally, characters are known by multiple names, and it takes a while to figure out who is who. The later sections are more straightforward and easier to follow, and illuminate some of the mystifying aspects of the first part.
Although I found this novel compelling, fascinating, amazingly written, and moving, and although it is considered Vargas Llosa's masterpiece, which it well may be, I enjoyed The War of the End of the World more. show less
The beginning show more section of the novel is very dense and requires extremely careful reading and rereading because the conversation between Santiago and Zavala is interspersed with other conversations between a whole host of other characters, but they are often "conversations" in name only since one person will say something on one page and the response to it may be several pages later, with various other stories happening in between. Additionally, characters are known by multiple names, and it takes a while to figure out who is who. The later sections are more straightforward and easier to follow, and illuminate some of the mystifying aspects of the first part.
Although I found this novel compelling, fascinating, amazingly written, and moving, and although it is considered Vargas Llosa's masterpiece, which it well may be, I enjoyed The War of the End of the World more. show less
This is a story about one man's movement from favoured son to prodigal to black sheep, set against the double background of thrillerish political machinations in the Odría dictatorship in Spain in the 1950s and a social-realist supporting cast, like Les Miserables if there was no loving God and everyone was depressed. It could have been a much better book than it was: Vargas Llosa can occasionally write, and islands of dreamy clarity (?) (!) emerge from a greasy dishwater-brown sea of lazy self-indulgence, soggy sense-description, irritating verbal tics, and piss-poor piss-stream of consciousness, seeming less like he was trying to capture the way thought processes work than that he just couldn't be bothered filling in the missing show more words or thinking about how his sentences were structured. And sometimes neither do I, but they never gave me a Nobel Prize for it. show less
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Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral) in Author Theme Reads (February 2011)
Author Information
380+ Works 34,352 Members
Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru on March 28, 1936. He studied literature and law at the National University of San Marcos and received a Ph.D from the University of Madrid in 1959. He is a writer, politician, and journalist. His works vary in genre from literary criticism and journalism to comedies, murder mysteries, historical show more novels, and political thrillers. His books include The Time of the Hero, The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Feast of the Goat, and The War of the End of the World. He has received numerous awards including the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, the Premio Leopoldo Alas in 1959, the Premio Biblioteca Breve in 1962, the Premio Planeta in 1993, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1994, the Jerusalem Prize in 1995, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Conversation in the Cathedral
- Original title
- Conversación en la Catedral
- Original publication date
- 1969 (original Spanish) (original Spanish); 1975 (English: Rabassa) (English: Rabassa)
- People/Characters
- Ambrosio, Zavalita
- Epigraph
- Il faut avoir fouillé toute la vie sociale pour être un vrai romancier, vu que le roman est l'histoire privée des nations.
Balzac, 'Petites misères de la vié conjugale'.
"To be a true novelist one must delve into all of social existence, since the novel is the private history of nations".
Balzac, 'Little miseries of conjugal life'. - Dedication
- To Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo
- First words
- Desde la puerta de La Crónica Santiago mira la avenida Tacna.....
From the doorway of La Crónica Santiago looks at the Avenida Tacna without love: cars, uneven and faded buildings, the gaudy skeletons of posters floating in the mist, the gray midday.
Dalla porta de "La Crónica" Santiago guarda l'avenida Tacna, senza amore: automobili, edifici disuguali e scoloriti, scheletri di pubblicità luminosa che ondeggiano nella nebbiolina, il mezzogiorno grigio. In che momento si... (show all) era fottuto il Perù? - Quotations
- ¿Cuándo se jodió el Perú?
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)...y después, bueno, después ya se moriría ¿no, niño?
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Avrebbe lavorato qui, là, magari tra un po' poteva esserci un'altra epidemia di rabbia e lo avrebbero chiamato di nuovo, e poi, qui, là, e poi, be', e poi sarebbe morto anche lui, no signorino? - Original language
- Spanish
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 863.64 — Literature & rhetoric Spanish, Portuguese, Galician literatures Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000
- LCC
- PQ8498.32 .A65 .C613 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures Spanish literature Provincial, local, colonial, etc. Spanish America
- BISAC
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 78
- ASINs
- 16