{"id":1777,"date":"2011-01-03T15:23:16","date_gmt":"2011-01-03T13:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=102"},"modified":"2011-01-03T15:23:16","modified_gmt":"2011-01-03T13:23:16","slug":"mario-vargas-llosas-el-sueno-del-celta-considering-what-the-nobel-prize-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2011\/01\/03\/mario-vargas-llosas-el-sueno-del-celta-considering-what-the-nobel-prize-means\/","title":{"rendered":"MARIO VARGAS LLOSA\u2019S EL SUE\u00d1O DEL CELTA<\/em>: CONSIDERING WHAT THE NOBEL PRIZE MEANS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tFirst posting of the new year: happy 2011!<\/p>\n

\tI don\u2019t wish to turn this blog into a space for reviewing but, as happens, I\u2019ve been reading Vargas Llosa\u2019s El sue\u00f1o del celta <\/em>(2010) and I do feel the need to vent my deep disappointment. <\/p>\n

You may recall from a recent post that I recommended this book \u2013I hesitate to call it novel\u2013 as it deals with the fascinating Roger Casement, an Irishman who became a fervent patriot only after witnessing the outrages of colonialism in Congo and Peru. Being Peruvian and, allegedly, an excellent literary writer, Vargas Llosa seemed highly qualified to recall Casement\u2019s story for the benefit of the Spanish-speaking world, where this heroic Irishman is not known. The fact that Llosa is also a conservative, right-wing failed politician and a well-known opponent of nationalism should have warned me that he was a less than ideal choice. Yet, the problem with El sue\u00f1o del celta<\/em> is not just its wavering gender and political ideology but, mainly, its flat, insipid writing.<\/p>\n

\tOf course, reading Vargas Llosa\u2019s account of Casement\u2019s sad life so soon after reading Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em> highlights even more Llosa\u2019s limitations as a writer \u2013at least in this particular book, which is my first by him. The atrocities, yes, are more accurately described and the visual impact of what horrified both Conrad and Casement is higher; Conrad\u2019s novella is irritatingly vague and too timid in comparison to what actually traumatised him and indeed a clear case of the limitations of literary representation (yes, he did know and this is what Heart<\/em> is mainly about). Yet, the beauty of its nightmarish prose is unsurpassable and I suspect that knowing he could by no means match it, Llosa went for the simplest possible Spanish. So bad, believe me, that at points he seems to be translating from English and characters are said to be \u2018perdiendo su sanidad\u2019 instead of their \u2018cordura.\u2019 Repetitions of events abound as if Llosa felt too lazy to edit them out while characters come and go with little depth of characterisation, as Llosa seems more interested in pouring down all the details he\u2019s learned in his (superficial) research than in building a proper novel. At points, yes, this feels like non-fiction but of the worst kind, nothing to do with Adam Hochschild\u2019s excellent King Leopold\u2019s Ghost<\/em> (1998) that Llosa knew so well, as he wrote a prologue for the Spanish edition and was the inspiration for El sue\u00f1o<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\tI am also wondering whether rather than celebrate Casement as a hero, Llosa is sending out a warning to all those poor misguided souls, queer or not, who fight for the independence of their nations. As you\u2019ll recall, Casement was a former British consul that became involved with the Irish uprising of 1916 and, having conceived the mad plan of asking Germany for help in the middle of WWI, was executed as a traitor. It seems to me that the segments on Congo and Peru do reflect the abuses of colonialism whereas the segment on Ireland completely fails to do so, insisting instead on the poor planning of Irish independence and the ensuing bloodbath. As for Casement\u2019s notorious Black Diaries<\/em>, which portray in singular detail his many sexual encounters with young men and whose authorship is dubious, Llosa has decided that they are Casement\u2019s but partly a fantasy, as if accepting a gay man as hero was subjected to limiting his promiscuity to tolerable numbers. You might argue that Llosa is here making an effort few conservative writers would make but I doubt this will please many LGTB activists.<\/p>\n

\tAll in all, I haven\u2019t learned anything new about Casement that I hadn\u2019t already learned in the afternoon I spent surfing websites about him. Llosa\u2019s research contributes many trivial details regarding location and the characters\u2019 appearance (and health, an obsession) but misses, for instance, the fact that Casement\u2019s report was a British Government Blue Book, calling it the Blue Book<\/em>, as if this were its title. I\u2019m mystified, though, about the unavailability of this crucial Blue Book on the net, where only an extract can be found. I\u2019d be thankful for tips on the e-text (I know of the print edition by Seamas O’Siochain and Michael O’Sullivan). My impression is that the Black Diaries<\/em> are much easier to find.<\/p>\n

\tTo conclude, whereas in the case of Heart of Darkness<\/em> I argued the need to bear in mind the ideology of the text and never judge it on its literary merits alone, in the case of El sue\u00f1o del celta<\/em>, which raises similar ideological issues, my point is that it fails miserably as a literary text, which is what it should be coming from the most recent Nobel Prize winner… if that means anything at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First posting of the new year: happy 2011! I don\u2019t wish to turn this blog into a space for reviewing but, as happens, I\u2019ve been reading Vargas Llosa\u2019s El sue\u00f1o del celta (2010) and I do feel the need to vent my deep disappointment. You may recall from a recent post that I recommended this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-heart-of-darkness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}