The War for the War of the End of the World
Farewell Mario Vargas Llosa
I was in college when I started reading literature by Latin American writers. First came Jorge Luis Borges (still my favorite—I have found myself rereading his brief note “A Comment on August 23, 1944” as the fascists take power here in the U.S.A.), then Jorge Amado (not necessarily great literature but very fun to read), Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. I think I read something by most El Boom writers, but these four were the ones I read the most. Vargas Llosa died on Sunday.
Vargas Llosa is probably most well-known for his humorous erotic novel Aunt Julia And the Scriptwriter, but the one that gripped me hardest was The War of the End of the World. This book is essentially a novelisation of an incredible work of history written in Brazil by a journalist named Euclides da Cunha in 1902. This book was called Os Sertões which is translated as Rebellion in the Backlands. It described a peasant uprising in the Brazilian state of Bahia in the 1890s lead by a messianic figure named Antônio Conselheiro. He founded a religious commune called Canudos. Conselheiro had a very anti-modernity philosophy. He was an apocalyptic preacher. He particularly loathed slavery, and most of his followers were formerly enslaved people. He also hated the Brazilian republic for separating church and state and was a devoted monarchist. (Brazil had an emperor for a while after it won its independence from Portugal.) A tax dispute lead to the violence that ended up being a multiyear war between Canudos and the Brazilian government. Vargas Llosa depicts the war as brutal and slightly surreal. Da Cunha as a journalist who witnessed the events became a character in Llosa’s novel. The novel is dedicated to Da Cunha.
When I read this book, I had borrowed a copy from my boss at the time, Gary Groth. I was living in his house as a tenant. Gary had an astonishingly large personal library—he was a very bookish guy. I would browse in it as if it were a public library. I saw he had a copy of The War of the End of the World which I had heard of and wanted to read. I borrowed it from Gary and was quite gripped by it—it is an onrushing descent into madness. But when I got to the very end, I found the book had a very weird misprint. Books are usually gathered up into bunches of 16 pages called a “signature.” Each 16 page signature is printed on a single large sheet of paper, folded, trimmed, and inserted into the finished copy. This is why there are often a few blank pages after the end of the text in a book. But when I got to the end of The War of the End of the World , what I found was that the second-to-last signature had been inserted twice, and the last signature was missing. I was about to read the climax of the book when suddenly the chapter I was just reading repeats itself and the ending is nowhere to be found!
I was extremely frustrated. I showed it to my roommate Mark and he commented on how strange it was. I told Gary that his copy was defective. He hadn’t read the book yet, so he hadn’t encountered the misprint. (Gary had a habit of buying way more books than he could read—a habit we share.) He took the book from me and I thought that was the last I’d hear about it. I resigned myself to check out The War of the End of the World from the public library so I could finally read the end.
But a few days later, Gary gave the book back to me and told me that he hadn’t found the misprint. I looked at the book, and the ending was right where it should be. No misprint. I was astounded. I asked Mark if he remembered seeing the misprint, and he told me with complete earnestness that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought maybe I had dreamed it. I was really doubting my grip on reality. I told several people about it, talking about how baffling it was that my clear memory of the misprint was apparently a figment of my imagination.
I was telling the story to people at the office for a few days when Mark finally admitted that it had been a prank. When I gave the misprinted copy of the book to Gary, he went to Elliot Bay Book Company and asked for a replacement for the defective copy they had sold him. He conspired with Mark to tell me that I had just imagined the whole thing and gave me the now pristine volume of The War of the End of the World. I was flabbergasted. I sputtered to Mark that no one would go through the trouble of conceiving so petty a prank, up to and including the recruitment of an accomplice to help. No one knew the term gaslighting back then, but Gary performed a master class in it. It was an excellent if somewhat disturbing prank.
I think I need to reread The War of the End of the World because by far my strongest memory of it is the bizarre misprint and the destabilizing prank that followed. This sounds like I am devaluing Vargas Llosa. But his books have given me a lot of pleasure. Perhaps the most fun to read, if not just as harrowing as The War of the End of the World, was The Feast of the Goat, set in the last days of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic. These are his best two books, in my opinion, and it is weird that neither of them are set in Vargas Llosa’s home nation of Peru. He doesn’t shy away from Peruvian settings—Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is set in Lima, and Who Killed Palomino Molero? and Death in the Andes are both set in rural Peru. But his two big epics get foreign settings.
As I write this, I may be giving readers the impression that I’ve read everything Vargas Llosa wrote and therefore am qualified to make general statements about his entire corpus. Not at all. Vargas Llosa was a prolific writer and I have at least ten more to dive into before I can call myself an expert—and I’m not sure I’ll get around to it. But I wanted to pay a small tribute to a writer who moved me for years.
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I was completely undone by the War. It was magnificent and excellent and I had secured a new copy for rereading just recently. But Death in the Andes, Palomino Molera, and the Real Life of Alejandro Mayta are also worthy entries in his canon, and somewhat eclipsed I think by the bigger-named books that have become widely famous in the US at least.