Peruvian Literature: Conversation in the Cathedral

Conversation in The Cathedral
Mario Vargas Llosa

Santiago Zavala, Zavalita, son of a tycoon during General Odría's regime, and Ambrosio, the old family chauffer, run into each other one foggy afternoon in one of Lima's ramshackle dog pounds.

They end up in the nearby The Cathedral, a ruinous bar, drinking beer and talking about the past. During the conversation Zavalita tries to unravel some obscure family episodes and, with the aid of Ambrosio, revives many stories of sex and love, power and corruption, violence and death.

Vargas Llosa -winner of the prestigious Principe de Asturias and Cervantes awards- recurs to a remarkable set of literary techniques to narrate the complex material of his novel. The meta- conversation between Zavalita and Ambrosio pervades the whole book and spawns the different stories that unfold gradually, eliciting in the reader suspense. Conversation in The Cathedral is a total-novel, in the way Vargas Llosa intended it: an overall representation of life itself, a novel that comprises everything.

Conversation in The Cathedral is an attempt to recount and understand a whole period in Peru's recent history -that of Odria's eight year dictatorship (1948-1956). Since the first paragraph and all throughout the 600 pages of the novel, Zavalita wonders "At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?". He finds no response, of course, other than the sorrowful feeling that the answer is always and forever, that there is no way out from the labyrinth of corruption, mediocrity, and decadence in which Peru is helplessly lost. Vargas Llosa, however, goes beyond the specific events and characters narrated to explore the origins and consequences of abject political power and human degradation. The result, more than an historic novel, is an evergreen -and pessimistic- portrait of Peru's society.

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