Harsh times

Peruvian Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa's latest novel dramatizes political turmoil in 1950s Guatemala while also revealing current anxieties about the untidy boundary between fiction and reality. We begin with a seemingly authoritative account of the United Fruit Company's banana monopoly and the U.S. government's dedication to rooting out a largely imaginary communist menace. But as the narrative slides toward the 1954 military coup, Vargas Llosa depicts behind-the-scenes interactions and figures not found in the history books. Among the latter is Martita Borrero Parra, aka Miss Guatemala, who becomes a mistress to both President Carlos Castillo Armas and operative Johnny Abbes García, who (along with Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo) readers may recall from Vargas Llosa's masterwork, The Feast of the Goat (2001). Although she's the closest thing this novel has to a protagonist, Miss Guatemala defies easy classification as villain or victim, survivor or cliché. Decades later, a first-person narrator (implied to be Vargas Llosa himself) visits Miss Guatemala in Virginia and finds an 80-year-old Trump supporter who dodges questions about the CIA and threatens to sue the writer. Thematically, it's classic Vargas Llosa in its obsession with power struggles, military hierarchies, and brothels. But it's also an unsettling reminder of the complicated relationship between storytelling and politics.

Peruvian Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa (The Neighborhood) spins a complex and mostly propulsive tale of deception, centered on Guatemala's political strife during the 1950s and '60s. The Eisenhower administration latches onto a lie about communism taking root in the country via president Jacobo Árbenz, propagated by juggernaut banana importer United Fruit, which faces taxes for the first time under Árbenz's regime. As part of its containment policy, and hoping to appease the company, the U.S. backs Lt. Col. Carlos Castillo Armas's successful coup d'état. Once in power, the married Armas takes a lover, Marta Borrero Parra, who advises him and acts as conduit to his ear. Meanwhile, Dominican Johnny Abbes García is sent to Guatemala by his own country's political leaders, who feel jilted by Armas, to orchestrate Armas's assassination. Johnny takes a shine to Marta and befriends Armas's director of security, Enrique Trinidad Oliva, with whom he plans the president's murder. Vargas Llosa follows this trio up to and beyond Armas's demise, as Johnny and Marta abscond to the Dominican Republic while Enrique is thrown in prison, and he employs a lovely Rashomon-style narration of Armas's death through multiple perspectives. The fragmented storytelling leads to unnecessary murkiness at some points, but once the action kicks in, everything falls into place. Vargas Llosa writes with confidence and authority, and overall this hits the mark. (Nov.)

Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Prize winner and sole survivor of the Boom generation, turns now to Guatemala in this novel about the 1954 CIA-backed coup there that ousted President Árbenz and the assassination of his successor, Castillo Armas, three years later; it's thematically linked with his 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat. The series of alternate narrative sequences, a Vargas Llosa trademark, is glued together by Marta Borrero Parra, President Armas's mistress who escapes under suspicion of complicity in his death. In a metafictional twist in the epilogue, the author interviews Marta, whose discourse casts doubt on the veracity of the events. The fate of others, however, is not so fortunate. The car of the head of Guatemalan security is bombed, and a prominent family is slaughtered by the Tonton Macoute. Vargas Llosa takes a while to get the story going; forward progress often gets bogged down in long sections that read like extracts from a newspaper or a history book. VERDICT The publication of a new work by Vargas Llosa is always a major event, but in this go-round, though treading new territory, he relies too heavily on recycled themes, indistinguishable characterizations, and documentary to carry the weight.--Lawrence Olszewski, formerly at OCLC

The Peru-born Nobel Prize winner crafts a vivid story centered on the U.S.--backed 1954 coup in Guatemala. Vargas Llosa turns, after two lighter novels, to a pivotal moment in Latin American political history. He starts with a chapter on the propaganda machine deployed by United Fruit--aka the Octopus--to retain its monopoly and tax-free status in Guatemala. Using stories planted in American media and the support of Washington, the company portrayed the government of Jacobo Árbenz as a seedbed of Soviet communism. Vargas Llosa portrays it as a democratic and progressive administration seeking to distribute land more fairly while reining in the Octopus. In subsequent overlapping narratives, he keeps the historical reality more or less in view while developing characters, scenes, and tension in imagined vignettes--not a historical novel so much as colorized history. A few recurring figures provide helpful landmarks in a busy, time-shifting chronicle. Most impressive of the fictional players is Martita Borrero Parra, who is impregnated by her father's friend at 14, forced to marry the man, and disowned by papa. She abandons her child a few years later and seeks the protection and bed of Carlos Castillo Armas, the man who led the push to oust Árbenz and replaced him as president. She becomes his secret adviser and remains influential in politics elsewhere after he's assassinated. The chapters that cover the preparations for that killing and its fallout provide another narrative thread. However much fiction or bias Vargas Llosa has added to the historical record, he makes a persuasive case, supported by West's lucid translation, that Washington's big-footing in '54 "held up the continent's democratization for decades at the cost of thousands of lives." History here gets a compelling human face through an artist's dramatic brilliance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.