The Irreparable Fissure: Indians, Regions and Nation in Three Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa

In his novels The Green House (1966), The Storyteller (1989) and Death in the Andes (1996), Mario Vargas Llosa reinforces the dominant visions in which the Peruvian Andes and jungle are portrayed as the realms of barbarism and savagery respectively—as opposed to the Coast, which is considered the civilized center of the nation. I discuss how he resuscitates topics like cannibalism and the extirpation of idolatries in colonial times, clearly employing the linear evolutionism of the nineteenth century. He uses these familiar tropes and images to characterize, as did his predecessors, indigenous people as savages, cannibals and pagans who constitute an obstacle for the development of Peru in a neoliberal and global world.