In the preface to the novel, Vargas Llosa writes:
ruled between 1948 and 1956 Peru, a military dictatorship headed by General Manuel Apolinario Odría. In those eight years, bottled in a society in which political parties were banned and the civic, the censored press, there were many hundreds of political prisoners and exiles, Peruvians of my generation went from children to young people and youth men. Even worse than the crimes and abuses that the regime was committed with impunity the deep corruption that from the center of power radiated to all sectors and institutions, debasing a lifetime.
This climate of cynicism, apathy, resignation and moral decay of ochenio Peru, was the raw material of this novel, which recreates, with the freedoms we are privileged to fiction, political and social history of those dark years. Can
corruption that emerges from a totalitarian regime vilify the privacy of individuals? Is the moral rot in power will extend to family relationships, personal, love of ordinary people? It's hard to tell, and Conversation in the Cathedral is far from a novel thesis. A once raised his intention in the brief preface, the author is removed and gave the floor to its characters without there being any narrator between them and the reader. Dialogues, memories, inner and outer monologues are writing the story with a misleading objectivity and apparent anarchy of situations, times and characters (as in a nutshell the author is who chooses what is going to show and especially when). Chaotic structure has been carefully planned to give the impression of veracity, the direct testimony of a turbulent period by a group of people from different social classes united by their common and petty lives, their problems seldom reach tragedies and joys cheap and useless. Money will not buy the greatness vital one, nor poverty will ennoble those affected.
What so special about these characters that keep the reader glued to the book for more than seven hundred pages fictional account of this billet? Not just what is so special: his deep humanity, their reality as human beings and human beings feel, suffer and dream, each in its own way and each in its own measure, regardless if they live in the suburbs or in the slums. Vargas Llosa manages to give dignity to the worst of the corrupt politicians, and also shows the indolence and cowardice of dreams the young hero who wants to rise above the indignities of reality. There are no good or bad in this novel, for all are regular but each in his way, and this gives it a universal and eternal dimension to local history in the extreme. A book made to recover the joy of reading, because if some authors are able to write books like this, you have to read them.
