Bookshot #19: The War Of The End Of The World

Author's Note: I'm playing with PhotoBooth on the SexyHandMeDownMac (what I'm writing this on- it's twin is the ScruffyWorkHorseMac) and decided not to go through all the bother of taking a picture and uploading it. The drawbacks of using PhotoBooth should be immediately obvious, so all future Bookshots will be using the traditional method of taking a picture and uploading it.



And look what I learned how to do! Tip of the hat to The Quiet Man for the tip! (It does help when you actually explore a program a bit before just taking a picture.)


It took me years to crack this book. For some reason, it looked fantastic, it was so dense and so meticulous and required so much attention to all the details sliding past you that I would martial an attempt to read it only to fall short or get distracted. This book is incredible, but it asks a lot of the reader- by the end of it, I actually liked that. Books shouldn't be easy, necessarily- it's nice when they are, but occasionally you need a real bastard of a book that pushes you to read every word and pour over every page, because the reward of conquering such a book can be great indeed- doubly so if the author has managed to write something actually worth reading.

Happily Mario Vargas Llosa delivers and then some. The War of The End of The World tells the story of Canudos, a brief rebellion that flared in the Northeast of Brazil at the end of the 19th Century and was brutally suppressed by the- then anyway, New Brazilian Republic- the back of the book describes the place this way:

Deep within the remote backlands of 19th Century Brazil, lies Canudos, home to all of the damned of the Earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars and their like. It is a place where history and civilization are turned upside down. There is no money, property, income tax, no marriage or census, no decimal system. Canudos is the revolutionary spirit in its purest and most apocalyptic form- a state that promises to be a libertarian paradise but that the forces of the modern world and the nation-state cannot tolerate.

Make of that what you will. However the font of all knowledge that is Wikipedia tells a slightly different story. Basically, Canudos was founded by an itinerant preacher from rural Bahia by the name of Antonio Maciel who eventually became known as Antonio Conselheiro or Anthony the Counselor. He attracted a racially diverse mix of followers to the area and they founded a settlement that at its height attracted 30,000 inhabitants and developed a prosperous leather exporting business. They came under attack by the Government for a variety of reasons- first, was that they essentially expropriated the lands belonging to the very powerful land owners at the time and second, there were rumors that Conselheiro was a monarchist- something that the newly minted Republic of Brazil was not a fan of, to say the least.

There were three attempts to take the settlement that were repulsed by the inhabitants- a fourth finally overwhelmed them and during the last siege Conselheiro died of dysentery and the Brazilian Army showed little, if any mercy to any inhabitants that were left. Today, the old city doesn't exist anymore. It was drowned when a dam was erected on the nearby river in the 70s- and the old church that used to stand there is visible sometimes in low water.

So now that you've got a little bit of a background, how does Vargas Llosa do it? Well, I think the back of the book sums it up nicely- Canudos was a revolutionary uprising that challenged both the traditional landholders in the area and the centralization that was being promoted by the Republican government in the country- the tragedy of the book is that the people of Canudos, the poor, the wretched of the area were attracted to the place because for them, it was a better life. And that better life was worth dying for in the end- and the characters- and there are many of them, all seem to be willingly embrace that fate.

I won't bother trying to decode all the characters- read the book- I don't have that kind of time. But what I have been wondering about is what does it all mean? What is Vargas Llosa trying to say? Do the poor and wretched of the Earth rise up just to be slapped down every time? Are we all doomed to misery- is the promise of salvation afterwards enough hope to find some purpose in a cruel, cruel world? Is government bad? Is government good? Are the rich and powerful- whether they're reactionary (like the landowners) or progressive (like the Republic) inherently evil? Do people have a chance against such entrenched forces? I'm not sure if even Vargas Llosa knows for sure- but the people of Canudos struggled valiantly only to be mowed under by the forces of modernization.

Overall: if there's a book that I love, it's a book that makes me think. It's an author that can tell a huge, complex, insanely intricate story and yet be thought-provoking at the same time- with a special bonus of telling me something about history that I didn't already know. Haunting, beautiful, tragic, The War of The End of The World is a Latin American Masterpiece- if not a must-read for any serious student of world literature. Put this on the shelf right next to '100 Years Of Solitude' and keep it there!