El sueño del celta / The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa: A Review

In case you found Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine difficult to understand, here is Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel El sueño del celta to explain to you exactly what happened in those novels. Roger Casement, the novel's protagonist, was a British consul who traveled to Congo and the Amazon and wrote scandalous reports about the horrible treatment of the natives of Africa and South America by the colonial forces. Later on, he joined the Irish nationalist movement and militated for the cause of Ireland's independence.

This is not a novel that offers much - or any, I would say - space for the reader to analyze, interpret, imagine, or look for his or her own answers. Everything is spelled out with painstaking attention to detail. As a result, some parts of the novel sound like they were copy-pasted from an encyclopedia. Sources of historical data, short biographical sketches of real-life people who appear in the novel, dates and gigures populate the pages of El sueño del celta. Vargas Llosa seems to have lost his capacity to relinquish control over his text and allow the readers to interact with it on their own. For those who managed to remain unfamiliar with the civilization versus barbarity conflict, Vargas Llosa makes absolutely sure that you will be sick to death of both terms by the end of the novel. And for those who didn't get the message that imperialism is wrong, it will be hammered in on every other page.

Everything I have written so far has probably made you think that I hated the novel. This, however, is not true. El sueño del celta doesn't offer much for analysis but it is surely informative and very well-written. I now know everything I ever wanted to know (and a lot, lot more) about Roger Casement, his travels, struggles, ailments, friends, foes, hopes and dreams. This novel is anything but boring. Vargas Llosa is a great narrator who can turn anything into a great story. I have no doubt that this novel will be quite successful if only for the fact that it is very easy to read.

The enumeration of sufferings inflicted by the colonial forces on the natives of African Congo and the indigenous people of the Amazon becomes painful to read at a certain point. This, of course, is a story that needs to be told and repeated as many times as possible lest we forget that imperialism can never be excused. I have to warn you, however, that an honest piece of writing about colonialism (such as this one) will be so disturbing as to prevent you from sleeping at night.

There are people who insist that Vargas Llosa is a Libertarian. It is a statement that is as silly as claiming that Juan Goytisolo is a Communist. Writers have a tendency to try on political discourses without really knowing what those discourses are about. They don't, however, allow their political triflings influence what and how they write in any way. It's been a while since I have read an indictment of the horrors that free market and wild capitalism inevitably bring along that would be as passionate and convincing as El sueño del celta. Anybody who believes that it would be a good idea to let market forces act freely, without any restraints from the government, should read this novel and hopefully just shut up already. In El sueño del celta,Vargas Llosa condemns the horrifying greed of free market capitalists better than any writer I have read in a while.

Argentinean "Intellectuals" Against Vargas Llosa

What I find confusing is the use of the word "intellectuals" in this piece of news:

 Intellectuals close to President Cristina Kirchner launched a campaign Tuesday to stop Mario Vargas Llosa from opening the Spanish-speaking world's largest cultural fair because of his disparaging remarks about Argentine politics. . . Peru's Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel prize for literature, has been invited to inaugurate in mid-April the International Book Fair in Buenos Aires, which UNESCO expects to be attended by more than one million people. The intellectuals are angered over Vargas Llosa's statements on Argentine politics and personal attacks against Kirchner. In a recent interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the writer, who is an outspoken proponent of free markets and liberal democracy, described Kirchner as "a total disaster." "Argentina is going through the worst form of Peronism, populism and anarchy. I fear that it is an incurable country," he told the newspaper.

Since when do the "intellectuals" ally themselves with politicians who are in power in order to hound a writer for expressing his views? Vargas Llosa does, in fact, have a tendency to espouse unintelligent political beliefs. In this, he is no different from many other writers who make fools of themselves by becoming mouthpieces of barbaric regimes. (Juan Goytisolo immediately comes to mind.) 

Still, no true intellectual would even think of defending some dime-a-dozen politico at the expense of one of the greatest writers of the XXth century. Historically, nothing could be more insignificant than the antics of the Kirchner couple. Vargas Llosa's contribution to the artistic legacy of humanity will remain long after everybody forgets who the Kirchners were. Argentinean "intellectuals" just made themselves look very stupid here.

Thank you, Margaret Soltan, for reporting this.

Aristocracy

The Spanish king Juan Carlos awarded the title of Marquis to the great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa*. It's great, of course, that the king is trying to do something to recognize a writer who has done so much to make the people of the world love and respect literature in Spanish**. Still, the very idea of honoring a writer by giving him a title is quite bizarre. The concept of aristocracy, of some people being better than others because they were born to a certain family, is one of the most ridiculous inventions of humanity. Nowadays, it has become popular with the surviving European monarchs to award nobility titles to important artists in order to save the concept of nobility from complete oblivion. 

The very nature of creative talent is such as to make of it the exact opposite of the concept of nobility. Even if you come from a long line of talented writers, painters or musicians, this heritage does not bring you even an inch closer to being capable of creating your own work of art. The nobility of spirit and the nobility of blood often fail to coincide at all. An artist always begins creative work from scratch. A noble has every advantage possible from birth but, more often than not, never manages to transform it into something worthwhile.

For these reasons, I find it funny that Juan Carlos of Spain would think that he has something he can give Mario Vargas Llosa to honor him. The power of this writer's creative genius gives him a much greater right to confer honors on other people than any such right that a king might possess. It would have made a lot more sense for Vargas Llosa to decide whether he chose to honor the king of Spain.

* The link is in Spanish.

** If you are looking to get familiar with the work of this great writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, I recommend his beautiful novel The War of the End of the World. Another novel by Vargas Llosa that merits attention is The Bad Girl: A Novel. This novel represents the writer's contribution to the attempts to create the great Latin American love story. In my opinion, all such efforts until now have failed (Juan Rulfo got close to this goal in his novel Pedro Paramo, even though the novel itself is not centered on love) but Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl: A Novel is a good effort in that direction.

Mario Vargas Llosa Wins the Nobel Prize!

Finally!!! After years of handing out Nobel Prizes to people almost nobody knows and absolutely nobody reads, the Nobel committee conferred the prize to the impossibly talented Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Of course, I am convinced that while Juan Goytisolo is living giving the Nobel Prize to anybody else is a joke. But then again, Goytisolo - the most gifted writer of the second half of the XXth century in the world - is way too good for the Nobel.

Vargas Llosa is an amazing writer. Among the writers of the Latin American Boom, he is definitely my favorite. Vargas Llosa simply doesn't know how to write a bad sentence. His novels are complex and beautifully structured. He is even a lot less machista than other writers from Latin America. Of course, male chauvinism is still there in his books. However, unlike Garcia Marquez, who is a virulent and unrepentant woman-hater, Vargas Llosa has gone to great lengths over the years to reduce the degree of male chauvinism in his work.

Now, of course, everybody will rush to buy his books. (Maybe they will appear in Kindle format in the original). I feel extremely jealous of those who will now get a chance to read Vargas Llosa's books for the very first time. As one of my professors once said, "I really wish I get Alzheimer's when I grow old. Imagine the joy of re-dicovering all these amazing books as if you had never read them before."

If you are among the lucky readers who are about to discover Vargas Llosa, I recommend that you start with his beautiful novel The War of the End of the World. It will give you a taste of what Vargas Llosa is capable of but, at the same time, this is not one of his most difficult novels, so it will ease you into his way of writing.



In case you want to read something more recent - but still absolutely amazing - by this author, I recommend you read his The Bad Girl: A Novel. Written in 2006, this novel is an attempt by the writer to analyze the roots of male chauvinism and address machismo as a way of being that has dominated Latin America for centuries. Among the male writers of Latin America, Vargas Llosa, I believe, is the only one who at least made an effort to recognize his own machismo and look at it critically.

Congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa and to all of us who have loved and followed his work for years!