Llosa Mario Vargas Archives

Living in an Evil World

“At times I doubt, Excellency. But years ago I reached this conclusion. There is no alternative. It is necessary to believe. It is not possible to be an atheist. Not in a world like ours. Not if one has a vocation for public service and engages in politics.”

I have long been fascinated by Mario Vargas Llosa novels, and at long last I have read one I can recommend as a starting place. The Feast of the Goat. A brilliant novel. (But, I hasten to add, not for the squeamish. Llosa is all too masterful at convincing the Reader that some of the characters in the novel are truly evil.) (See here for a discussion of his other novels.)

It is the tale of Trujillo, the longtime strongman dictator of the Dominican Republic. The novel has shifting perspectives, Trujillo himself, the set of people who assassinate Trujillo (don’t worry, that is not a spoiler), the daughter of one of Trujillo’s cronies returning to the country decades after leaving it, and the people who managed the government in the aftermath of Trujillo’s death. Expertly done.

The quotation at the outset is a government official responding to Trujillo’s question. Why is it not possible to be an atheist in a world like theirs?

Trujillo was, like many another Latin American dictator, a hard, vicious ruler, maintaining order in the country with the fear arising from an extensive police network and well-used torture chambers. In the chapters examining Trujillo’s interior world, we find a man who seriously believes that what is good for him is good for the country, that his own enemies are enemies of the state, and that his own pleasures are benefits to the state. We get glimpses of a past when he had not confused matters to this extent, hints that maybe once upon a time, Trujillo really did care more about the actual country than himself, but those days are long gone.

Everyone else in the novel lives in the shadow of Trujillo, for good or ill. Therein lies the moral quandary.

If you are in a state dominated by a vicious ruler, how do you craft a good life? Obviously being complicit at the highest level of an evil regime is evil. But, what about being a soldier in the army? What about working in one of the dictator’s personal businesses? If your only choices are work in some way to support the dictator or watch your family be murdered, what do you do? Obviously not the sort of thing you ever want to have to figure out. So, set that question aside.

Returning to the question at the outset, the official who makes the remark above is onto something which generalizes. The reason he has to have a religion is that it is the only thing that can possibly check the descent into evil while working in Trujillo’s government. “Without the Catholic faith, the country would fall into chaos and barbarism.”

How? Without the Catholic faith, then everyone would end up like Trujillo, there would be no check to the evil impulses within. Catholicism is “the social restraint of the human animal’s irrational passions and appetites.”

Whenever the question of human nature arises in conversations with my students, I am always struck by their genuine belief in the fundamental goodness of humans. Sure, bad people exist, but in their view of the world, everyone is basically good. Indeed, if explicitly asked to name someone who is evil, there is invariably just one name mentioned. (Zero points for guessing which name.)

All of this makes me wonder: how do people who believe in the inherent goodness of humans explain Trujillo or the head of Trujillo’s secret police or the soldiers who derive great pleasure from torturing others? Good people gone bad? But why did they go so bad? Why was their no check on their descent into evil?

Another way of wondering the same thing: given these two options, which would be harder to explain?

1) People are basically good, but sometimes people do very evil things.

2) People are basically evil, but sometimes people do very good things.

The second seems easy to explain: a benevolent God extends his grace to allow evil people to refrain from evil. The first? It isn’t obvious to me how that would make sense.

Recommending Mario Vargas Llosa

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.

This is the seventh novel by Llosa I have read. I have also read a collection of his non-fiction work.

I am thus reasonably certain that I enjoy reading Llosa.

(Well, it’s either a) I enjoy reading his work or b) I am supremely masochistic when it comes to reading. I am fairly confident that it is the former, but would entertain arguments that the latter is more accurate.)

So, having now finished eight books by Llosa, it seems reasonable that I would be able to answer a rather simple question: What makes Mario Vargas Llosa (a Nobel Laureate, no less) someone whose work is a pleasure to read?

And now the problem for the day. I have no idea why I like Llosa. None.

I have read eight books he wrote, but to the best of my recollection, I have never once recommended his work to anyone.

Part of the reason that I have never recommended him is that I would have a very hard time picking which book of his to recommend.

I’ve liked every one of them enough to think I should read another book. Yet, they all have this quality about them, this undefined quality, which makes me think, “Well, I liked that book, but I am not really sure who else would like that book.”

Consider the novel I just finished. Young Peruvian author—who currently writes news blurbs, but wants to write novels—hooks up with his older, divorced, Bolivian Aunt. (Don’t worry too much: there is no blood relation between the Young Peruvian and the Aunt.)

Meanwhile, the Young Peruvian novelist regularly interacts with a scriptwriter for radio serials. The Aunt and the Scriptwriter meet once, but otherwise the stories do not overlap.

Every other chapter in the novel is a short story which is the storyline from one of the radio serials written by the scriptwriter. The main story meanders along in the odd numbered chapters.

Eventually Young Peruvian and Aunt get married much to the distaste of the larger family. The scriptwriter goes insane. In the epilogue, we find out the marriage does not last.

End of story.

Now, I have a hard time imagining that anyone read the preceding description and thought, “That is a book I simply must read.”

So, is it the prose style which makes the book sing? It can’t be—the book was written in Spanish, so this is a translation, and his novels, all of which I have enjoyed, have different translators.

So, it must be something about the way the stories are told which makes him so compelling.

And that is what puzzles me—after seven novels, it seems like I should have some ability to describe what it is that makes Llosa novel so good, and yet I cannot.

It also seems like after seven novels, I should be able to tell someone, “You really ought to read book X. It’s really good—I think you’ll like it.” Not that I should be able to tell everyone that—but I should be able to tell someone that, right?

At this point, my inclination is to conclude with a recommendation that you, The Reader, should read Book X. But then I think about the novels I have read, and I cannot figure out which title to substitute for X.

After a lengthy pause, staring out my window, I arrived at the following, thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion the present post:

Dear Reader, Mario Vargas Llosa is a Nobel-prize Winning Peruvian novelist. I have enjoyed every novel of his I have read. You should try reading him. A good place to start is (select one) [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Storyteller, The War of the End of the World, Who Killed Palomino Molero?]

And right after finishing that conclusion I realized, that all books are not equal. So, really, start with The Storyteller if you like the idea of reading Peruvian short stories; The War of the End of the World if you like long Victorian British novels; Death in the Andes if you like vaguely disturbing endings; or Aunt Julia if you like clever short stories which feel like they just continue after the story is done.

Next up on my Llosa reading list, by the way: The Feast of the Goat.