Difficult times

Tiempos recios

Douban

NeoDB

◆This is an indispensable work in the works of Vargas Llosa. If you want to understand the whole of Central America and Latin America, this book is a must-read.

◆ "A beautiful and disturbing novel that attempts to confront evil and hopes to drive it out." Vargas Llosa returns to his "Latin American" identity.

◆Based on real events in the early days of the Cold War, the novel is "an awe-inspiring historical and political novel" with superb narrative techniques.

◆If the question explored in "Bar Talk" is "When did Peru get unlucky?", then the core theme of "Hard Times" is "When did Latin America get unlucky?"

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In 1954, a CIA-backed military coup in Guatemala overthrew the Arbenz government, which was implementing land reform and striving to become a US-style democracy. Behind the coup was a lie that triggered a political crisis and altered the future of Latin America: the Eisenhower administration claimed that the Arbenz government, under the guise of reform, intended to serve as a bridgehead for Soviet communism to penetrate the American continent.

"Hard Times" depicts a Cold War-era political conspiracy and the conflicting interests of the actors involved, whose repercussions continue to this day, embroiling multiple nations. In this new novel, Mario Vargas Llosa explores two fictional approaches to reconstructing reality: the narrative's free rein over characters and events, and the manipulation of history by those intent on controlling the continent's political and economic lifeline.

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Media Comments:

Mario Vargas Llosa, whose writings have given us an image of South America, deserves a place in the history of contemporary literature. In his early career, he was an innovator of novelistic technique, and now he is a poet of epic poetry.

—Per Westerberg, Chairman of the Nobel Prize in Literature Committee

If the question explored in "Bar Talk" is "When did Peru get unlucky?", then the core theme of "Hard Times" is "When did Latin America get unlucky?"

—Pilar Reyes, Editor-in-Chief, Fountain Press

What Árbenz wanted to do was peaceful reform, to turn Guatemala into a democratic country without bloodshed, something we Latin Americans have long hoped for.

—Mario Vargas Llosa

A beautiful and disturbing novel that attempts to confront evil in the hope of banishing it.

——"Babelia", the cultural supplement of Spain's El País

2023-01-01

人民文学出版社

99 Readers

288

9787020176427