The War of the End of the World

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world’s great storytellers. His novel Conversation in the Cathedral is a classic narrative of tyranny and filial love, while his ribald tale Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a comic masterpiece. The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa’s new work, brings together all of its author’s superb gifts in an epic historical novel, a realistic panorama of Tolstoyan sweep that is at once a magnificent literary accomplishment and an enthralling story.To compare The War of the End of the World with the great historical novels of a Tolstoy or a Stendhal is no hyperbole. Vargas Llosa has chosen to retell one of the crucial events of Latin America: the uprising in the Brazilian backlands that almost reversed the history of the continent. It is the story of an apocalyptic prophet and the state he created—Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth, to prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and their like.In Canudos, history and civilization are turned on their ears. There is no money, property, marriage, no income tax, decimal system, or census. Canudos is the revolutionary spirit in its purest and most apocalyptic form—a state which promises to be a libertarian paradise but which the forces of the modern world and of the nation-state cannot tolerate.The International Herald Tribune has described this novel as “at one and the same time a major literary work, an adventure story, a historical drama, and an inquiry into ideological fanaticism and ‘utopian’ violence in Latin America.” Vargas Llosa has described it as his most ambitious novel to date; it will unquestionably be called his most successful.