Book Review: The Time of the Hero

As I discussed in my earlier post on The Time of the Hero, I didn’t enjoy Vargas Llosa’s first book as much as some of his other novels when I read it for the first time. As I picked it up to read it for my class, though, I was determined to start fresh with the novel and give it a fair chance. After finishing the re-read, I was glad that the class forced me to return and reevaluate the novel; I enjoyed The Time of the Hero a lot more once I was prepared to consider its more crude elements from new perspectives (read my earlier post for more on this). I also simply found the novel more interesting and engrossing once I was able set aside my initial impressions of certain (sexual) scenes.

Beyond what I’ve already said on this subject, I started thinking about how a lot of the more seedy and sexual elements of the novel follow the conventions of literary Naturalism. Naturalism grew out of realism, which is essentially the attempt to portray reality more straightforwardly than Romantic or Surreal literature, but Naturalism purposefully contains more crude and sordid subject matter in its attempt to illustrate how social conditions and other elements of one’s environment, as well as heredity/genetics, are extremely important factors in the development and determination of a person’s character.

The Time of the Hero addresses this idea in very complex ways – the boys in the military academy come from very different socio-economic backgrounds and have very different family situations, yet all of them become corrupt and degenerate participants in the military academy culture once their freedoms are restricted and their dignity is constantly threatened. As suggested by the epilogue, once the boys emerge from the company of their fellow military academy cadets, they also seem much more capable of leading normal, less degenerate lifestyles. The implication is that something about the social environment at the military academy are what prompt these boys to act in more crude, violent and animalistic ways (a la Lord of the Flies) – which for some reason is shocking to the military leaders who run the academy.

Even after reading the novel twice, though, I am not convinced that The Time of the Hero expresses a completely unavoidable, deterministic relationship between social environment and the development of an individual’s character, though. Especially because the character Ricardo Arana never behaves in the same violent and crude ways as his fellow classmates, it seems as though Vargas Llosa may have been agreeing with the philosophies of the Naturalists on one level, while challenging an entirely deterministic philosophy/worldview on another level.

Once I begin to understand how certain sexual scenes (which I initially found to be quite distracting) contribute to the novel’s themes of corruption and degeneration, I was not only able to appreciate the relationship between Vargas Llosa’s writing and the European Naturalists, but other ways in which the author made use of genre and literary tradition in The Time of the Hero. Stylistically, Vargas Llosa makes it clear that he admires the Modernists, with his forays into stream-of-consciousness writing in certain passages and the unusual structure of the narrative. Clearly, he’s been reading his Europeans and his Modernists – Woolf, Joyce and Proust, and he’s paid particularly careful attention to his Faulkner.

But Vargas Llosa doesn’t only make use of the conventions of “high brow” literature – one thing that we touched on in class was that the novel actually plays into the Detective Novel/Crime Fiction genre in many ways. This was interesting for me to consider because while I love my Sherlock Holmes, my Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys novels, and have even enjoyed my share of Lord Peter Whimsey, I don’t consider myself a big fan of Detective Novels or well-versed in the Crime Fiction genre overall. I am a much bigger fan of adolescent fiction, so while the “who-done-it” suspense may have been what drew others into the second half of the novel, I was simply absorbed in the more general development of the characters by that time and was focused on comparing the boys in The Time of the Hero to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. I’m not sure if this is a particularly unusual way of reading this novel, but I think I try to understand most (if not all) teenage boys through the lens of Holden Caulfield. It was interesting to realize that Time of the Hero essentially puts the adolescent novel into dialog with certain conventions of Crime Fiction, while adding a certain Latin American flavor to the mix as well. In fact, I think that this is what made me enjoy the novel so much the second time – the combination of compelling (re: confused, confusing) adolescent characters and a vague was-it-really-murder? mystery.

In the end, I would encourage readers (again) to set aside any scruples that they might have regarding sexual content, and to appreciate the many excellent qualities of The Time of the Hero. This novel is both disconcerting and engrossing, and while it isn’t light reading to throw in your bag and take to the beach, it entertains even as it reveals the seedy underbelly of adolescence and the disturbing potential of society to reduce us all to primal creatures. It isn’t cheery, but it’s four stars…

This post participates in my Mario Vargas Llosa Reading Focus.

Early Impressions: The Time of the Hero

I remember that when I first read The Time of the Hero two years ago, I did not like it nearly as much as the rest the novels that I had read by Vargas Llosa. As I picked up the Nobel Prize-winning author’s first novel to begin re-reading it this weekend, however, I could not remember why I had not enjoyed it. I quickly became absorbed in the opening – high school boys rolling the dice to see who from among them would be elected to steal a chemistry exam. Then the unlucky boy, sneaking across the campus and through the school. He successfully copies the test, but breaking a window pane on his way out. From this tense set-up, then novel then shifts to the perspectives of several other characters, introducing us to some of the boys involved in the incident. Although I found the multiple perspectives and passages written in stream-of-consciousness fairly confusing at first, I was engrossed and ready to take another stab at enjoying this story.

Then, about twenty pages into the book, I was rudely reminded of what had soured me on the novel before.

The Time of the Hero is about a group of high school cadets in a military academy in Lima and these boys, like many bored teenage boys, do some things that would shock anyone who is not now or has never been a teenage boy. They are constantly smoking, drinking, gambling, reading erotic literature and they even sneak out to see a prostitute from time to time. Okay, fine. I’ll just be honest up front here – no one who wants to remain innocent and unaware of sexual escapades should make a habit of reading literature by Latin American men. Deviant/wild sexual practices (as judged in comparison to traditional Western practices) abound in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, among others. So you’ve been warned.

Even though I’ve read Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman, I was unprepared for the scene twenty pages into The Time of the Hero – and I’m going to go ahead and spoil it for those of you who don’t want to be taken unawares. Our group of extremely restricted and bored teenage boys aren’t just relieving their sexual tension by visiting a prostitute from time to time, which is something that seems to be more common and acceptable for fifteen year-old-boys in Latin America than it is in the United States. The boys decide to steal a chicken and… relieve their sexual tension using the poor bird.

So while I started to get engrossed within the first nineteen pages or so, I found this scene more than a little disturbing and to be honest, it tainted the rest of the novel for me when I read it two years ago.

During my current reading, however, when I reached and continued reading past this scene, I asked myself why this scene might be justified, necessary, important or at the very least “admissible” (for lack of a better word). In other words, what might Vargas Llosa’s motives have been when including this scene, whether or not he personally found it disturbing? Why should I bother reading the rest of the novel if this scene bothers me? (I know that many people would simply put the book down after encountering something like this, and for some of you, that’s perhaps a valid choice.)

To answer this question, I think that it is important to consider that when it was first published, The Time of the Hero was denounced by officials at the Leoncio Prado Military School, which Vargas Llosa had actually attended during his adolescence, and the novel was publicly burned. In other words, Vargas Llosa was writing from his own real-life experiences and many Peruvian generals and other military officials weren’t excited that the façade of their disciplined, polished military operation was being torn away to reveal a very slimy under-belly. Military officials are supposed to have control of their cadets, but the teenagers in this book are so desperate for any type of freedom that they end up involved in some pretty despicable activities – screwing a chicken being the most notable, but many of the initiations that they inflict upon younger students are also pretty disturbing.

But think for a moment – why do most teenagers taunt and torture kids who are younger and weaker than themselves? Why does a bully become a bully?

Because s/he feels powerless.

And that’s what this novel is really about – the kind of corruption that develops when those who have power use that power to bend others to their will, the kind of cultural degeneration that occurs when leaders take away the basic freedoms of other human beings, rob them of their dignity and their ability to have a say in their own fate. (Most of) these teenage boys have been sent to a military academy against their will, have been deprived of free time, any recreation or human affection that was formerly theirs, and forced to accept cruel displays and abuses that quickly wear away at their dignity. The only way to maintain their self-respect is to return cruelty with cruelty, violence with violence. These boys are under the thumb of their superiors at the military academy, so they turn around and abuse those in the classes below them. They are looking for something that will help them to feel less powerless, help them regain their dignity.

And so, while the scene in which the boys abuse the chicken certainly jolted me out of a comfortable reading reverie, I think I now understand better why that scene is actually somewhat important to include in the novel. Vargas Llosa needs readers to understand the extent of the corruption and degeneration of both the leaders and the students at the military academy – this depravity is both a context and a catalyst for the events in the rest of the novel. If readers do not understand the degeneration and desperation of these boys, the death that follows mid-way through the novel will seem random – but by describing the boys’ sketchy pastimes, the novel is able to communicate that the tragedy has some very specific causes, including the culture in which these boys are being raised. As the quote paired with the epilogue emphasizes much later in the novel, “in each lineage / deterioration exercises its domination” (Carlos German Belli).

This post participates in my summer Reading Focus on Mario Vargas Llosa.

Note: As I read longer novels, I will sometimes post thoughts about the book before I finish reading it, then still write a separate review. These are some of my initial thoughts from as I read the first half of The Time of the Hero, which is why I have not yet included a rating. Check back over the weekend for a full review of the novel.

Reading Focus on Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Prize laureate for Literature, has been one of my favorite Latin American novelists for several years, and I was recently offered the opportunity to be the teaching assistant for a literature course dedicated to the study of his work. I obviously couldn’t pass the offer up, given that I have loved almost all of his novels that I have read over the past few years and that I am eager to read even more of them. The class will give me the chance to discuss his work with others, as well as keep my teaching instincts active. As I go through the class, I will also be able to add some reviews of Latin American literature to the blog, and so I am introducing a new feature for the summer – a Focus on Mario Vargas Llosa.

Vargas Llosa is from Peru, and many of his early novels have to do with his perception(s) of Peruvian society – novels such as In the Time of the Hero (The City and the Dogs, in Spanish), The Conversation in the Cathedral, and The Green House. These early works are also amongst his most challenging novels to read because Vargas Llosa, like many of the authors of the Latin American Boom, was greatly influenced by the European and American Modernists – novelists like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner who experimented with narrative form. The Modernists developed techniques like stream-of-consciousness writing and narrative time shifts which many readers find challenging, baffling, even frustrating. If you don’t mind working a little harder at first to acclimate yourself to these narrative forms, however, much of their work is quite interesting and beautiful.

As time has gone on, some of Vargas Llosa’s novels have adopted more traditional narrative structures and/or shifted to focus on more broadly international landscapes. That is not to say that novels such as The Storyteller, Death in the Andes, The Feast of the Goat, or The War at the End of the World are “easy to read” novels, either, though. Many Latin American novelists tend to produce very dense, long novels – and Vargas Llosa is no exception. But in my opinion, these novels are also quite rewarding: I have learned a lot about different cultures, lives lived in rural poverty and under dictatorships, and been challenged to consider ethical questions that arise when two cultures are confronted with one another.

Obviously, these aren’t novels that you read for the same kind of entertainment as when you pick up a Fantasy or a Romantic Adventure, but even so, they have compelling stories that are entertaining in a different way. Some of his novels, such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, are more light-hearted, but all share several things in common: engrossing stories and characters, compelling situations that draw the reader into another world. Vargas Llosa has written novels in many very different genres, and I find his work interesting in part because I believe that it is important not to confine yourself, as a reader or a writer, to the same genres. As I search for new reading material, my main desire is to find compelling, engrossing stories.

So although Vargas Llosa’s novels are very different reading material than most of the books that I have reviewed so far on my blog, I invite you to learn more about the work of this Nobel Prize-winning author as I re-read some of his novels and discover others for the first time. You may or may not feel inspired to join me in reading some of these dense novels, but I encourage you to at least check out my reviews as I move forward through the class – hopefully my reviews will give you some insight into the world of Vargas Llosa in and of themselves.

Check back over the next two months (or so) for thoughts and reviews on several of Vargas Llosa’s novels, including In the Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Storyteller, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The Bad Girl. I may add more to that list as I move forward, as well.

Book Review: Mossflower

I was pleasantly surprised to find just how much I enjoyed Redwall, the first of Brian Jacques’s fantasy novels that I had ever read. In comparison, I did not enjoy its prequel Mossflower quite as much, which was disappointing.

Although the second novel that Jacques wrote about his woodland creatures of Mossflower County is certainly full of action and adventure, I could not take seriously the threat posed by the self-involved cat Queen Tsarmina and her incompetent army of rats and stoats. Although he was a rather stereotypical villain, at least Cluny the Scourge was not laughable and his plots were not as easily ruined by bungling troops. There are a few more serious and gruesome battles between different woodland creatures and Tsarmina’s forces, but since most of the fights are brief and the efforts of the rats and stoats are usually fairly absurd and unsuccessful, these battles were not enough to create the feeling that the woodlanders were truly in peril. Tsarmina and her forces seem more like a nuisance than a danger. Of course, some might find the more light-hearted tone of Mossflower enjoyable, but part of what I really enjoyed about Redwall was the combination of the adorable woodland creatures with the truly sinister villains.

Additionally, the characters were not as well-developed in Mossflower as they were in Redwall. I found myself very drawn to the aspiring warrior mouse Matthias in Redwall, who had several quirky little traits and adorable moments before he grew into the confident hero of the novel. In Mossflower, however, Martin the Warrior is not nearly as distinctively developed, and although I wanted to feel an affection for the main character of the novel, I found myself much more fond of Gonff, the self-proclaimed Prince of Mousethieves. Making up little ditties before, during and after each adventure, the joyful and musical little mouse was much more adorable and interesting than his companion Martin.

As for many of the other characters, there were so many mice, otters, squirrels, hedgehogs and ferrets running around in this novel that it started to feel as though Jacques was just enjoying the sheer size of the world he was building and his growing cast of characters – and consequently he did not have time to imagine and describe any of them in any great detail or depth. There are a lot of potentially really interesting characters and plot elements in Mossflower – Boar the Fighter and his mysterious ability to “see what is written,” the otters, Gingervere the cat, “the Mask,” the sea rats – but Jacques tries to cram so many creatures into the novel that we don’t learn enough about any one of them to really get attached to them.

Similar to how Jacques jumps too quickly from one character to the next, he also jumps from one event to the next in Mossflower. Although the quest that Martin and his band undertakes – the journey to Salamandastron – certainly involves many adventures, I didn’t find any of them as involving as the much more well-developed unraveling of the riddle and resulting quest for Martin the Warrior’s sword that Matthias undertakes in Redwall. I was intrigued by the initial riddle that the group had to tackle to determine the route to Salamandastron, but it turned out to be far less complicated and interesting than the search that Matthias had to carry out right within the abbey.

This is not to say that there is nothing enjoyable about Mossflower – I was still somewhat entertained by the novel and I enjoyed Redwall, so I’m not ready to give up on the series yet. I can see why kids would enjoy the many adventures and quick pace of Mossflower. I hope that Mattimeo and Mariel of Redwall will be more well-developed, though.

This post participates in my Focus on Fantasy Reading Challenge... join me in reading fantasy literature this summer!