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Mario Vargas Llosa's "Conversation in the Cathedral": Power Politics in a Corrupt Society

1987; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1208313

1548-9949

Charles Rossman, Mario Vargas Llosa,

Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity

Conversation in The Cathedral is Mario Vargas Llosa's most overtly political novel. To be sure, all his books reverberate with political implications, given their depiction of political corruption, the abuse of power, the exploitation of the weak, and the coerciveness of the socioeconomic hierarchy. But Conversation in The Cathedral addresses such themes directly and explores them within an explicitly political setting in modern Peru. The novel centers on those rich and powerful Peruvians who jockey for position during the dictatorship of Manuel Odria, who seized power in 1948 but yielded it to an elected president, Manuel Prado, in 1956.1 Conversation focuses on Peru's recent history as the occasion for a fictive meditation on the sources, nature, and consequences of power. Conversation is doubly concerned with how the quest for power transforms one's life, and with how that quest affects the lives of others not themselves immediately caught up in the struggle. Conversation therefore depicts in detail the lives of two distinct groups of people: on the one hand, the politicians and wealthy businessmen who vie for power; on the other hand, several people who are peripheral to the political drama itself, yet intimately involved with its chief actors. The first group includes Cayo Bermuidez, Odria's most powerful minister; Fermin Zavala, a wealthy businessman who eventually plots against the Odria government; and a cluster of generals and senators. The second group includes Santiago Zavala, Fermin's son; Ambrosio, a black chauffeur who works at different times for both Bermidez and