THE STORY TELLER by Mario Vargas Llosa 1st/1st - Signed

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JUNK is stuff you throw away........ STUFF is junk you keep." 6norm6 THE STORY TELLER by Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Helen Lane Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1989 First American Printing Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most prolific Latin American " Boom " writers. His novels can be considered as microcosms of Peruvian society. Vargas Llosa has used the mythical, popular and heroic elements in his texts to capture the social, political or cultural reality of this country.Major themes of his texts are violence, machismo, formation of social and political hierarchies; corruption; struggle against the authoritative regimes and religious fanatism. His novels can be viewed as " national allegories " in Jamesonian sense, as well as texts that challenge the so called " first-world " readers with their narrative and thematic complexity. This, the Nobel laureate's tenth novel, was originally published in Spain by Seix Barral Biblioteca Breve under the title El Hablador (1987) . The Storyteller is a novel on cultural conversion and the impossibility of the avoidance of hybridism. Despite centuries of explicit or implicit attempts to Occidentalize and Christianize the indigenous tribes, in the eyes of the narrator they remain as a " Handful of tragic, indomitable beings, that society has broken up into tiny families, fleeing, always fleeing, from the whites, from the mestizos, from the mountain people, and from other tribes, awaiting and stoically accepting their inevitable extinction as individuals and as a group, yet never giving up their language, their gods, their customs " ( The Storyteller , 164) . There is sadness in the voice of the narrator who is nostalgic for the reality that now belongs to the past and cannot be regained. But the novel undoubtedly suggests the impossibility of maintaining ones authenticity and autonomy in such a hybrid atmosphere as the Global World. As Vargas Llosa says himself: " It is tragic to destroy what is still living, still a driving cultural possibility, but I am afraid we shall have to make a choice where there is such economic and social gap, modernization is possible only with the sacrifice of the Indian cultures " (D. Sommer, 31) .Machiguenga motif band blind stamped on front cover. 8vo. 246pp.Terra cotta colored boards / black cloth spine with copper lettering. No remainder marks. Unclipped dust wrapper; $17.95 Signed by author on title page CONDITION: FINE / NEAR FINE Dust wrapper has silght crease to top corner of rear end flap otherwise remains very attractive encased in a new archive quality Brodart mylar cover. Mario Vargas Llosa (1936- ) was born in the Peruvian city of Arequipa. He spent part of his childhood in Bolivia and was a voracious reader from the start; with an inclination toward classic novels of adventure such as The Three Musketeers , he sometimes penned his own endings, if the ones supplied were not to his liking. Vargas Llosa moved back to Peru with his family in 1945. For a time they lived in the small city of Piura, whose desolate house of prostitution would figure heavily in Vargas Llosa's novel, The Green House ( La casa verde ). Vargas Llosa later attended parochial school in Lima, but after his father found out about his literary efforts he was sent for two years to a military school called Leoncio Prado. From then on, Vargas Llosa resisted his parents' wishes. Attending law school in Lima with the intention of serving Peru's poor, he began to write in earnest and in 1958 won a trip to France as a prize for a short story he had submitted as a contest entry. The trip would be the beginning of a 15-year exile from Peru, during which Vargas Llosa ascended to literary fame. His first novel, The Time of the Hero ( La ciudad y los perros , 1962) drew on his experiences at the military school. Military personnel there gave Vargas Llosa ... read more

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