Recommendations from our site
“It was a difficult choice because he has written some 14 major novels. He is a writer who changes with every novel, adopting a range of different styles. But when I was reading around the Nobel prize, I learned that all the Nobel committee members read this novel when they were deliberating about the prize. And even though I have about four favourite novels of his, that seemed a good reason for picking this one. Conversation in the Cathedral represents a time in the late 1960s when Vargas Llosa was still very committed to the hope of radical social change in Latin America. In this novel he analyses the nature of a corrupt, unjust, hypocritical society that was the Peru of his adolescence, under a military regime. He thought that if you could expose the nature of the corruption you might move on and replace it with something better. He finds ways of telling his stories which are really quite extraordinary in terms of their architecture, their formal complexity and elegance. The title sounds like a religious topic but actually the cathedral turns out to be a seedy bar in downtown Lima.” Read more...
The Best Latin American Novels
John King, Literary Scholar
