Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (which won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto are utterly unalike in subject and content, and yet reading them in alternation (I began the later before finishing the former), I found them to be absolutely in concert with each other. One is a desperately grim, epic account of a war between religious fanatics and a repressive military and the other, the ramblings of a sexual hedonist (Rigoberto) and the highly erotic concerns of his wife Lucretia and his son Fonchito. The War is page after page of starvation, sudden bursts of horrific violence (mutilations, rapes, and, ultimately, senseless slaughter of a grand -- if indeterminate -- scale), set within the parched landscape of the Brazilian backlands of the 19th century. The Notebooks is set among Don Rigoberto's etchings, his leather-bound books and, most centrally, the soft, silken sheets and down pillows of numerous beds, couches, chaises, and lounge-chairs.

And yet, and yet, ultimately both, relying on a similar pattern of overlapping narratives, chronological shifts and blurred transitions between narrative, flashback and fanstasy, embody the same worldview, and do so powerfully. Both novels virtually spit out a dissatisfaction with all human institutions -- religion, marriage, government, the military, the police, capitalism, communism, any and all social institutions -- which are seen at best as useless and more often as insidious, invidious, inherently prone to violence and failure. Rigoberto's loathed day-job as an insurance agent, which serves as a sort of cover for the hedonism and fantasy that forms the core of his life, is perhaps emblematic of the pointlessness of all these institutions. Why insure the pointless dreck with which we surround ourselves?

Don Rigoberto sounds off on one of several passionate digressions on the flawed nature of collective identity, the common delusion lurking behind all such institutions:

Behind patriotism and nationalism, there always burns the malignant fiction of collectivist identity, that ontological barbed wire which attempts to congregate "Peruvians," "Spaniards," "French," "Chinese," et cetera, in inescapable and unmistakable fraternity. You and I know that these categories are simply abject lies that throw a mantle of oblivion over countless diversities and incompatibilities, and attempt to abolish centuries of history and return civilization to those barbaric times preceding the creation of individuality, not to mention rationality and freedom.

In both novels, everyone is brimming with hypocrisy. Characters in love cheat on one another (and in the most violating of manners), "saints" engage is senseless violence. The War presents the nature of religion and of the state and pathetic and hypocritical, with both represented as equally based on ideology and equally vicious. At the most desperate moment, at the end, the marauding bandit Satan João, rechristened Abbot João in his new role as religious leader, orders the killing of the starving aged, women, and children who are in the process of surrendering. This is, for Llosa, the senseless and unavoidable result of faith in social institutions.

At the very end of The War, a minor character returns after a hiatus of a few hundred pages, and serves as a metaphor for the entire epic that has come before. "Bandit-Chaser" Colonel Macedo has come, like so many others, to the "holy" city ofCanudos with glorious visions before him, but finds only the dust and rot at the core of the whole endeavor:

[T]his entire experience, which was to be the greatest one in his life, the crowning reward of his perilous race toward respectability, has turned out instead to be a series of disillusionments and vexations.

In contrast, the libertine Don Rigoberto finds bliss through rejection of these very institutions. He becomes so deeply lost in a series of personal fantasies that, by the last page, much of what had seemed to be part of the main narrative is dissolved in to his elaborate escapism. Indeed, throughout, many of the short chapters and passages melt away before they reach their conclusion, with little or no transition between the fantasies they present and the "reality" of the novel, with shifts in voice, perspective, or time sometimes occurring mid-sentence.

The sly duplicitousness of Fonchito is perpetually before the reader. Young though he is, he is as much the author of his father and stepmother's fantasies as they are. Intermingled with their various obsessions is Fonchito's preoccupation with Egon Schiele and his torturously and sexually posed figures, twisting amongst one another with troublingly young partners in echo of one of the main themes of the novel.

Ultimately, though, underneath all the turmoil, is real passion. I will leave you with this beautiful fulmination. If it appeals, buy both these books and read them in tandem:

I know of no lie more base than the phrase taught to children: "A sound mind in a sound body." Who ever said that a sound mind is a desirable goal? In this case, "sound" means stupid, conventional, unimaginative, and unmischievous, the vulgar stereotype of established morality and official religion. That is a "sound" mind? It is the mind of a conformist, a pious old woman, a notary, an insurance salesman, an altar boy, a virgin, a Boy Scout. That is not health, it is an impairment. A rich, independent mental life demands curiosity, mischief, fantasy, and unsatisfied desires, which is to say a "dirty" mind, evil thoughts, and the blossoming of forbidden images and appetites that stimulate exploration of the unknown, renovation of the known, and systematic disrespect toward received ideas, common knowledge, and current values.

Damn.