The green house

The green house ( Spanish La casa verde ) is the second novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa from 1966. The work was awarded the 1967 International Novel Prize "Rómulo Gallegos". The action on two spatially far apart locations in northern Peru spans several decades in the first half of the 20th century. Everything essential in the text, including the domicile giving the title, has a dual character. The green house is both a busy , green-painted brothel near the Pacific and the vast Selva .

action

The locations are located on the upper reaches of the Marañón in the Amazon region and then to the west of it in the coastal sandy desert.

Santa Maria de Nieva

Both the Chinese-born robber Fushía and the Kazike Jum, an aguaruna , want to do the rubber business without Don Julio Reátegui. Fushía first came to Iquitos from Campo Grande via Manaos . The rubber business then drove him to remote Nieva. As governor of Santa María de Nieva, Reátegui, who usually resides in distant Iquitos, has the longer arm. He has Chief Jum tortured in public by the military and gives a little girl in Jum's company to the nuns of the Nieva Mission for a Christian education. The little heathen, an aguaruna girl, grows up under the name Bonifacia in Nieva. Jum retires to the jungle after his release . Much later he appears in Nieva and unsuccessfully asks for his confiscated merchandise.

Fushía flees to a remote river island north of Nieva. He has two helpers - old Aquilino from Moyobamba and the pilot Adrián Nieves, a deserter from the Peruvian army. The pilot, a single Christian, has made off to Nieva with Fushía's partner Lalita, a white woman from Iquitos. Lalita had been with the heartless Fushía since she was fifteen. Fushía's illness broke the relationship. Nieva and Lalita have wrested a piece of land from the jungle, live together in a hut and have several small sons together. Faithful Aquilino saves the seriously ill Fushía from Reátegui's soldiers on a month-long flight by boat to Iquitos to the infirmary near San Pablo. Aquilino gives up all of Fushia's cash to house Fushia.

In the meantime, Bonifacia has grown up to be a young girl, years later the nuns expelled her because she made it possible for young Indian girls to escape from the mission building. This escape is a loss for the missionaries. The six to fifteen year old girls from the Aguaruna, Huambisa and Shapra tribes are taught not only religion and morals, but also home economics. In this way they can later be placed as maids in Christian households. Lalita and Adrián Nieves take on Bonifacia. The pilot makes friends with Sergeant Lituma. The sergeant comes from remote Piura and has volunteered for the Amazon region. In the pilot's hut he gets to know the small and broad, but very young, well-formed Bonifacia. Lalita couples Lituma with the intimidated green-eyed Bonifacia. The deserter Nieves is arrested.

After years in Iquitos, Lalita visits her grown-up son, whom she has together with Fushía, and meets Aquilino there. She learns from him that the pilot has been released and gone to Manaos.

Piura

Anselmo comes to Piura as a stranger and makes friends through generosity. The newcomer has a brothel built in the sand dunes outside the city gates and painted green. The Green House will soon be well attended. Anselmo not only hires whores, but also musicians. He plays the Arpa himself. This is the harp - painted green to match the house. The owner of the Green House is also called the Arpista after his instrument. The guardian of virtue, Father García, is Anselmo's bitter enemy. But the brothel operator has the law on his side according to the civil code.

Anselmo has a child with his lover Antonia - the Chunga. Toñita, as Antonia was called, died shortly before the birth. As if by a miracle, the newborn had survived. Anselmo had kept her lover hidden in a tower of the Green House during her lifetime. Evil tongues claim that Anselmo stole the shy Antonia. He took her away from the foster mother Juana Baura, a laundress. Antonia's penultimate foster parents, the Quirogas, had been killed by bandits. During the attack, Antonia's eyes had been gouged out and her tongue torn out.

Opponents of commercial love, especially Father García, burn the Green House down. Years go by. Anselmo does not have the strength to start again. Over time, the Chunga develops into a shapeless but capable business woman and finally rebuilds the Green House in another place - this time in Piura on the river behind the slaughterhouse. Juana Baura has long since passed away. The resolute Chunga employs her now slightly confused and blind father as an arpista.

When Lituma and Bonifacia returned to Piura from the jungle, he soon went to the Green House to have a drink with old friends. The friends call themselves the invincible and are day thieves of the worst kind. Lituma, now in the worst possible company, finally arrives in prison in Lima as the winner in Russian roulette via the Piruan Seminario . Josefino Rojas, one of the indomitable, takes the place of the prisoner at Bonifacia. She is pregnant by her husband and is considering an abortion. Josefino sends her to the streets after the toilet. When Lituma comes out, he almost kills the “deputy”. Bonifacia, who is present at the punishment, also gets her kicks. After all, the "bitch" as a whore Selvática is one of the "inmates" of the Green House. A little later on the dance floor, Lituma has curbed his disappointment and takes on Josefino's pimp role: “Do your job, whore, ” he commands his unruly wife in the presence of the next suitor . At Lituma's behest, the Selvática is no longer allowed to behave like a savage in civilization. He raises her with slaps.

Anselmo, who moved into Piura as a young man, now almost blind, dies as an old man in the Chunga's Green House. He was around eighty years old. In a touching and comical scene, Father García had forgiven his adversary for his sins. On the occasion, the Selvática had successfully asked for forgiveness for their whoring. During his lifetime Anselmo had passed himself off as a compatriot of the Selvática. Contrary to popular belief in Piura, he is a Selvático. That's why he had the harp and house painted green.

Quotes

• "All shops are dirty."
• "Life is one forbidden thing after another."
• "Nobody can be ashamed of their homeland."
• "Love does not understand reason."
• "Artists cannot live without art."

Self-testimony

In 1971 Vargas Llosa led the audience through his green house in the lecture “Historia secreta de una novela”. Countless stones would ultimately result in a mosaic. The author has building programs ready for this.

shape

The text is divided into four books and an epilogue. Sometimes the tense is changed.

The book is not read for a tired reader after work. The lecture amazes in places. For example, the two locations are switched within a chapter; sometimes without a blank line. Actually, the picture, coined in 1978 by M. Moody, has to be agreed: To immerse yourself in the chaotic narrative techniques means to go into a whirlpool . When, for example, Josefino is half beaten to death by Lituma, the reader is in the dark. The reason will be submitted later. Not only that the story is not told along the time scale at all. Moreover, the protagonists change - in the case of Sergeant Lituma, under two names - between Piura and Selva. Some readers who do not want to capitulate can suddenly fall into the role of a criminalist who, as a pedantic steward of the novel, has his dearest need.

For the reader who has become wide awake over time, the anachronistic part of such a narrative technique reveals a remarkable advantage. Since the beginning and then the end of the fate of a protagonist is communicated, the highly concentrated reader follows the text, curious about the missing middle section.

What has been said above in the “Action” section should be treated with caution. Because the reader knows some things from an uncertain source. For example, if Fushía tells that Reátegui got his fortune through smuggling, then that could also be defamation. The reader must not overlook the stylistic element irony combined with hypocrisy. For example, the narrator puts himself in the position of Mother Superior of the Nieva Mission when he writes that the mission is not an agency for domestic workers. The opposite appears to be true. The matron's ward was sexually mature at the age of eleven. As I said - almost everything essential is viewed from two sides. For example, if the reader takes note of Anselmo's description of Antonia's defloration, he might say to himself that it must be love. The people in Piura, however, are divided on this relationship.

reception

• Scheerer offers a well-founded introduction to the research work on the narrative techniques used in the novel, such as fragments, the communicating tubes, the Chinese boxes, the telescopic dialogues, the pluridimensional lecture and the scene coding - sounding names for text sequences that only a few readers could withstand longer. The omnipresent ambiguity is on purpose. The aforementioned fragment technique is a way out of the abundance of material. In addition to the narrative, Scheerer also offers some conceptual approaches to the social and philosophical background of the text. However, if Scheerer is taken literally, there are some things that are not written in the extremely diffuse text. Here are two examples. Aquilino would take Fushía to a leprosy station . The word leprosy is not mentioned. Fushía's illness can be assumed from the accompanying circumstances. Jum is Bonifacia's stepfather. Neither Bonifacia nor the reader can be certain of this. Such and other examples boil down to Vargas Llosa's cryptic standard of denial of information.
• Vargas Llosa knows his way around Piura. His grandfather, a relative of President Rivero , was prefect there until 1948.
• Lentzen deals with social structures in the Peruvian jungle. Only the rubber trader Reátegui, already wealthy as governor of Nieva, does the business. Fushía, who wants to keep up in business, fails because the governor labels him a criminal. Because Reátegui has the military behind him, he can also eliminate a second competitor, chief Jum, with naked force. Violence dominates in the relationship between men and women. Lituma overwhelms Bonifacia in Nieva. Conflicts between men also end violently. Lentzen calls the Russian roulette between Lituma and Seminario.

literature

Used edition

• The green house. Novel. Translated from the Spanish by Wolfgang A. Luchting. With the translator's comments and a map sketch of Northern Peru with the locations noted. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1992 (1st paperback edition 2011 (st 4330)), ISBN 978-3-518-46330-7

Secondary literature

• Thomas M. Scheerer : Mario Vargas Llosa. Life and work. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38289-6
• Norbert Lentzen: Literature and Society: Studies on the relationship between reality and fiction in the novels of Mario Vargas Llosas. Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn 1994 (Diss. RWTH Aachen 1994), ISBN 3-86143-053-3
• Christian Meister: Mario Vargas Llosa's storytelling techniques using the example of “La casa verde” and “Pantaleón y las visitadoras” , master's thesis. Grin Verlag, Munich and Ravensburg 2003, ISBN 978-3-638-70075-7

Remarks

1. ↑ At the town of Santa María de Nieva the river Nieva flows into the Alto Marañón (edition used, p. 30, 10th Zvu).
2. ↑ The Guardia Civil is also mentioned elsewhere (see for example the edition used, p. 169, 4. Zvo) .
3. ↑ The Duelpfer could come from the Miguel Grau Seminarios family .
4. ↑ "Selvática" means "the woman from the Selva".

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Edition used, p. 4, 9. Zvu
2. ↑ eng. Rómulo Gallegos Prize
3. ↑ beeline Piura Iquitos (is longer than Piura - Nieva (Nieva is not on the relevant maps))
4. ↑ Scheerer, p. 27 center
5. ↑ Spanish Santa María de Nieva (Perú)
6. ↑ see also map sketch in the edition used, p. 677 under the name "Fushías Insel"
7. ↑ eng. Huambisa
8. ^ Spanish Río Piura
9. ↑ Edition used, p. 297, 1. Zvu
10. ↑ Edition used, p. 199, 10th Zvu
11. ↑ Edition used, p. 373, 14. Zvo
12. ↑ Edition used, p. 512, 11. Zvu
13. ↑ Edition used, p. 584, 3rd Zvu
14. ↑ Edition used, p. 656, 4th Zvu
15. ↑ Scheerer, pp. 48-62 (Spanish Historia secreta de una novela )
16. ↑ see for example the edition used, p. 64.7. Zvo
17. ↑ see for example the edition used, p. 374, 7th Zvu
18. ↑ quoted in Scheerer, p. 22, 14. Zvo
19. ↑ Edition used, p. 70
20. ↑ Edition used, p. 175, 10. Zvu and p. 182, 14. Zvo
21. ↑ Edition used, p. 187, 10th Zvu
22. ↑ Scheerer, pp. 21–36 and pp. 48–62
23. ↑ Scheerer, p.
24. ↑ Scheerer, p. 22 below and p. 28, 4th Zvu
25. ↑ Scheerer, p. 48 below
26. ↑ Scheerer, p. 23., 6. Zvu
27. ↑ Edition used, p. 535 middle, p. 603 bottom
28. ↑ Scheerer, pp. 23., 22. Zvo
29. ↑ Edition used, pp. 133, 8. Zvo and p. 450, 1. Zvu
30. ↑ Scheerer, pp. 28., 5. Zvo
31. ↑ Scheerer, p. 172., 5. Zvo
32. ↑ Lentzen, p. 27 above
33. ↑ Lentzen, p. 29 below
34. ↑ Lentzen, p. 31 below
35. ↑ Lentzen, p. 37 middle
36. ↑ Lentzen, p. 38 middle
37. ↑ Lentzen, p. 44 middle
38. ↑ Edition used, pp. 672–676
39. ↑ Edition used, p. 677
40. ↑ The edition used is not free from printing errors (see for example p. 349, 1. Zvo and p. 455, 17. Zvo).