Harsh Times

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.