![]() ![]() ![]() Edward L Bernays is the director of public relations at United Fruits. ![]() The traumas begin as the result of a breathtaking historical lie (the first of many contemporary resonances). The novel swarms with life and a determination to tunnel down into the underlying truth of humanity The story ricochets back and forth in time, but the period that it focuses on is between the 1954 CIA-backed coup in which President Árbenz was overthrown and the 1957 assassination of his successor Carlos Castillo Armas, also as part of an international intrigue. Vargas Llosa stays tight to the historical facts but vividly creates the inner lives of his historical and invented characters, allowing the novel to speculate on detail and motive. We’re in Guatemala in the 1950s: neck-deep in corruption, the CIA and international conspiracy. This is exactly what we have here in Harsh Times. In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be: unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash of political ideologies intellectually capable of encompassing such scope artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama and all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken from all points on the compass of the human character. He has written myriad plays, novels, much journalism and nonfiction. He ran for president of Peru in 1990 and has a serious claim to be the pre-eminent Latin American writer of his generation. Now 85, Mario Vargas Llosa has won numerous literary prizes, from the Nobel down. ![]()
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