HARSH TIMES

The Peru-born Nobel Prize winner crafts a vivid story centered on the U.S.–backed 1954 coup in Guatemala.

Vargas Llosa turns, after two lighter novels, to a pivotal moment in Latin American political history. He starts with a chapter on the propaganda machine deployed by United Fruit—aka the Octopus—to retain its monopoly and tax-free status in Guatemala. Using stories planted in American media and the support of Washington, the company portrayed the government of Jacobo Árbenz as a seedbed of Soviet communism. Vargas Llosa portrays it as a democratic and progressive administration seeking to distribute land more fairly while reining in the Octopus. In subsequent overlapping narratives, he keeps the historical reality more or less in view while developing characters, scenes, and tension in imagined vignettes—not a historical novel so much as colorized history. A few recurring figures provide helpful landmarks in a busy, time-shifting chronicle. Most impressive of the fictional players is Martita Borrero Parra, who is impregnated by her father’s friend at 14, forced to marry the man, and disowned by papa. She abandons her child a few years later and seeks the protection and bed of Carlos Castillo Armas, the man who led the push to oust Árbenz and replaced him as president. She becomes his secret adviser and remains influential in politics elsewhere after he’s assassinated. The chapters that cover the preparations for that killing and its fallout provide another narrative thread. However much fiction or bias Vargas Llosa has added to the historical record, he makes a persuasive case, supported by West’s lucid translation, that Washington’s big-footing in '54 “held up the continent’s democratization for decades at the cost of thousands of lives.”

History here gets a compelling human face through an artist’s dramatic brilliance.