The War of the End of the World

Vargas Llosa rebuilds the real 1896 to 1897 siege of Canudos, the settlement founded in Brazil's arid sertão by the itinerant preacher Antônio Conselheiro, from Euclides da Cunha's landmark history Os Sertões into a sprawling novel of competing convictions, none of which survive contact with the actual war intact. Conselheiro's followers, drawn from the region's poorest and most abandoned, read the young Republic's secular reforms, civil marriage, the metric system, a national census, as the literal work of the Antichrist, and build Canudos as a refuge from that apocalypse. The Republic's officers, in turn, read Canudos as proof of a monarchist restoration plot backed by foreign powers, a reading with almost no evidence behind it that becomes true anyway simply because enough powerful people insist on repeating it.

Galileo Gall, a Scottish anarchist and self-taught phrenologist who travels to Canudos hoping to find a genuine peasant revolution he can attach his own ideology to, gives the novel its clearest case of a foreign abstraction failing to survive contact with the people it claims to speak for: Gall's revolutionary theory has almost nothing to do with what Conselheiro's followers actually believe or want, and his presence changes nothing about their war except adding one more outsider's fatal misreading to the pile. Vargas Llosa distributes that same failure across nearly every major character, the Baron de Canabrava watching his old feudal authority evaporate, a nearsighted journalist recording atrocities he can barely see, and the gap that keeps widening across all of them, between any ideology, religious or secular, and the specific, ungovernable people it claims to explain, is what the novel actually turns out to be about.

Da Cunha's Os Sertões remains the canonical Brazilian account of Canudos, but it was written by an engineer embedded with the Republic's army, watching the war from one side of the trench. Vargas Llosa's novel restores what that vantage necessarily missed, giving extended interior life to Conselheiro's followers, the bandit Pajeú, the freed slave and former circus performer known as the Dwarf, so that Canudos's residents stop being the alien mass da Cunha's chronicle sometimes reduces them to and become as fully reasoned, in their own terms, as the officers sent to destroy them. The choice to write across a full century and a language barrier to reclaim a Brazilian national trauma marks the novel as one of the Boom generation's most ambitious acts of historical excavation, a Peruvian novelist restoring interiority to a Brazilian catastrophe that had mostly been narrated from outside it.