Where to Buy
Affiliate links coming soon. Purchases will help support this project.
The War of the End of the World
8Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa's 1981 novel of the Canudos rebellion in nineteenth-century Brazil — fanaticism, idealism, and the collision of archaic and modern worlds; Latin American epic political fiction at its peak.
GBM Assessment (Score: 8/10)
Produced in this novel one of the great epic political fictions in the Latin American tradition. Based on the historical Canudos rebellion in nineteenth-century Brazil, the work explores fanaticism, idealism, and the collision between archaic and modern worlds with expansive ambition. Its polyphonic narrative structure and moral complexity cement its place among the essential novels of the late twentieth century.
The novel reimagines the Brazilian War of Canudos of 1896–1897, in which a millenarian community in the backlands of Bahia was brutally suppressed by the new republic's army. Vargas Llosa uses this historical episode to probe universal questions about the nature of political violence, the gap between ideology and reality, and the ways in which narratives shape our understanding of events.
Peru, 1981
Vargas Llosa publishes The War of the End of the World, his most ambitious novel — a retelling of Brazil's Canudos rebellion (1896-1897) that explores fanaticism, ideological blindness, and the catastrophic collision between modernity and millenarian faith. Latin American literature dominates the global scene; the Boom generation has proven that the novel in Spanish can match anything in English or French. Reagan survives assassination. AIDS is first identified. The space shuttle launches.
Awards & Adaptations
NOBEL 2010. Core in Latin American lit.
Recommended Edition
Helen Lane (1984)
