Truth and fiction intermingle in this fluid true-story narrative: the events are real. The characters and situations are re-created. And the lies that overthrew the democratically-elected president of Guatemala were not. In it, we can imagine the way that the US-based United Fruit Company fabricated a lie and used it to join forces with governments, disaffected mercenaries, and enemies of Guatemala's president's to stage a coup d'état. The process, if not the change of government, changed the course of history in Latin America. Despite the fact that the outcome is known to history, the reader can't help to sit in suspense until the last moment, hoping against hope that this time it could be different.
Stories like this break my heart. Vargas Llosa is a favorite author of mine, precisely because his work illustrates so well the passions and weaknesses of human nature. His portrayal of time so closely reflects reality--it doesn't really pass in an orderly, linear fashion, as we would like to believe, but instead takes unanticipated trips to the past alongside possible projections into the future. This is lyrical imagining of the details of historical reality, breathing humanity into what we read coldly in textbooks. It is also a timely reminder (although perhaps new to some?) of what the US Government and human nature are capable of doing in the quest for power and money.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

2.5. Half novel, half nonfiction, Llosa takes the trader through the 1954 CIA led coup which ousted President Arbenz and installed Armas as a dictator. Many of the characters are real figures--Arbenz and Armas themselves, Trujillo, Garcia, and others. The main character, Marta, is fictional and only partly sympathetic. The majority of the book follows a variety of contemptible characters.
Perhaps it would be more biting if Llosa's own politics were not so liberal. He portrays Arbenz sympathetically and the counterrevolutionaries as anything but, however, Llosa himself is still unapologetically anti-communist and ends his novel with a quick screed against Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, lest anyone get the wrong idea. Truly no person in this novel, perhaps not even the writer himself, understands the least what socialism means.
From a pure reading standpoint, Llosa had trouble making his mind whether to write like a novelist or a historian. You can definitely do both, and I have read books where this marriage works famously, but this is not one of those books.
It was interesting and worth a read. But to understand Gatemala's history you are better off reading Bitter Fruit.

On discovering Billie Holiday in my 20s I used to think with that voice, that soul, she could sing anything, the phone book, and it would be worthwhile, even essential, listening. Mario Vargas Llosa is to Spanish language literature what B Holiday was to jazz singing, and although in his 80s he still writes a book almost annually I still read every new book that comes out. Spanish may be the language of my childhood but English is the wired language of my brain and reading Spanish still requires an additional wall to climb over or crash through to finally immerse myself in the author's world. Llosas work is of such clarity, of such masterful construction, that it is the easiest Spanish forme to step in. In the sustained excellence and promiscuous quantityof his work, Vargas Llosa is perhaps most like Philip Roth, who continued writing into his late 70s until a voluntary retirement and death two years ago. It might be persuasively argued that Roths later work remained more vital and exuberant than Llosas has been. And I would tend to agree. He hasn't written an essential work since The Feast of the Goat, which this new book obliquely references. But when that new Llosa book inevitably is published next year I'll be lining up.

Fascinating and tragic. A well written and researched account of the brutal overthrow of a democratic government that was by all accounts politically moderate. John Foster Dulles and United Fruit are truly the embodiment of evil.

I didn’t know much about US involvement in Central America but have certainly been hearing much these past years about US actions that have caused much of the instability, corruption etc in these countries. This novel is seemingly based on a lot of actual circumstances…interesting novel of political intrigue while also highlighting how US corporate power has inflicted itself on this region.

Para venderla como similar en tema y tono a La fiesta del chivo, se queda muy muy por detrás de esta. A veces la historia naufraga en un mar de nombres, fechas y datos. Hay una labor de investigación muy buena, pero machaca la historia tremendamente. Los diálogos son bastante ridículos, y no he podido dejar de echar de menos ese tono potente, épico, con peso de La fiesta... Se agradece el intento, pero ya vamos tarde...

The setting of the novel is a fascinating, if disturbing, period in time, one that I enjoy learning more about (if for no other reason that it is incredibly important for a USAmerican to do so). The way it reads jumps between fiction and nonfiction to an extent that one can get confused about what is real and what is made up - perhaps intentional on the part of Vargas Llosa to mimic the blending of truth and fiction as generated in this time period.

With all that being said, I was HIGHLY disturbed by the concluding chapter, in which Vargas Llosa explains his own beliefs of how this episode in time reflects on US-Guatemala history. According to this chapter, the primary damage brought forth by this coup is that it allowed actual communists, like the guerrilla militias, to enact violence in Guatemala (and other Latin American countries). No mention whatsoever of the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, overwhelmingly Maya, who were slaughtered by government forces in the decades-long civil war against these communist guerrilla militias. No mention of the hundreds of Maya villages that were completely destroyed via massacres, nor of the over 1 million people who became refugees fleeing this violence. To be clear, the overwhelming majority of the murdered were not affiliated at all with violent leftist groups; the government simply equated being Maya with being a leftist and therefore sought to kill them. The idea that one can label an enemy a "communist" with no evidence and justify their murder based on that is directly linked to the anti-"communist" PR campaigns of the Red Scare and the anti-Arbenz movement. Yet for some reason, this anti-Maya violence that ultimately resulted from the coup just... isn't mentioned as a disastrous consequence of US interference in Guatemala.

For those who wish to learn more about this, I highly recommend Victoria Sanford's nonfiction book "Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala."