El hablador (Narrativa (Punto de Lectura)) (Spanish Edition)

Recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat," Vargas Llosa is also a former presidential candidate in Peru. In this classic, he investigates our essential need for fiction and explores the power of Western culture over the culture of Peru's Machiguengas. The novel opens in Florence when the narrator is rattled by a fuzzy photograph: part of an exhibition of Amazon Natives, it depicts an hablador, or storyteller, caught gesticulating to a rapt, native audience. The image of the primitive storyteller breaks open the tale of the oral treasures of the Machiguenga tribe, who bring stories from settlement to settlement traveling long and far in the Peruvian Amazon. In a style that mimics journalism, ethnography, and travel writing, Vargas Llosa lets two stories unravel together: the clean, rational narration of the writer from Lima who is enamored of the habladores and the flowing, mystical narration of the hablador himself. Mascarita, friend to the first narrator and known ally of the Machiguengas, is the bridge between these two stories. The passages narrated by the hablador, who embodies in his narrative style a limited idea of time and engenders the collective voices of the Machiguengas, is visionary and compelling. Recommended for all libraries and.—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Palo Alto, CA