City and Dog

Douban

NeoDB

The story begins with a group of military academy cadets plotting to steal chemistry exam papers and sell them. Their theft is discovered by school authorities, who order the thieves to surrender or face punishment for the entire class. Someone reports the thieves, and the gang's leader vows to track down the informer. Soon after, during a live-fire exercise, a cadet nicknamed "Slave" is shot and killed...

"The City and the Dogs" was written by Vargas Llosa based on his personal experience of studying in a military academy as a teenager. It is set in the Leoncio Prado Military School in Lima, the capital of Peru, and the bustling city of Lima. It revolves around several military academy cadets and depicts the cruel lives of the cadets and their various conflicts with the school authorities.

This was Vargas Llosa's first novel, published at the age of 27. Even before publication, it won the Spanish Concise Book Prize in 1962 and the Spanish Critics' Prize in 1963, catapulting Vargas Llosa to fame. Shortly after its publication, the novel was banned in the author's native Peru. The military government at the time burned 1,500 Peruvian copies of The City and the Dogs at the author's alma mater, the Leoncio Prado Military School.

The City and the Dogs is considered by some critics to be one of the four landmark novels that marked the beginning of the Latin American literary boom (the others being The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez). In 2001, the book was selected as one of the "100 Best Spanish-Language Novels of the 20th Century" by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

2021-06-01

人民文学出版社

99 Readers

432

9787020159529