The city and the dogs

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The city and the dogs ( Spanish La ciudad y los perros ) is the first novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa from 1962. The city is Lima and the dogs are cadets . It was not without reason that a thousand copies of the novel were burned in the courtyard of the “Leoncio Prado” cadet institute in Lima at the beginning of 1965 - a punishment by the military for an author who was trained as a young person around 1952 on the scene.

overview

A manageable fable is hidden in the extensive text corpus. 16 to 17-year-old thugs - above all the four-man mafia, consisting of the leader Jaguar and the gang members Porfirio Cava, the boa and the curly - torture their comrade Ricardo Arana to the point of blood behind the walls of the above-mentioned military school. The cadet Alberto Fernández is also involved in the harassment of the unfortunate comrade. The outsider Ricardo, known as a “slave” by the flails around him, only takes a beating. Not born a soldier, he also receives punishment after punishment from his superiors.

The mafia, in this case Cava, steals answers to chemistry exam questions and sells them to comrades. Ricardo tries to help his friend Alberto with a cheat sheet during the written chemistry test and is caught by the supervising young Lieutenant Gamboa. The penalty is curfew. Ricardo, who desperately wants to see his girlfriend Teresa, reacts with affect. Since Ricardo was on guard at the time of the theft of the chemistry questions, he reports Cava to a superior lieutenant and is rewarded with an exit. Cava is relegated. He takes all the blame even though he was instigated by the jaguar. During the next field exercise with live ammunition, Ricardo is shot in the head from behind and dies three days later.

Ricardo had sent his only friend Alberto as ambassador to Teresa outside during his curfew while he was alive. Alberto had betrayed his friend and fell in love with Teresa. After Ricardo's death, Alberto desperately searches for the shooter and accuses the jaguar of the crime in front of his superiors. With the help of an untrue medical opinion, the school's military leadership wants to present the sneaky shot as a regrettable accident. Ricardo is said to have shot himself. Alberto is coerced by the headmaster, a colonel, to retract his egregious accusation. As it turns out, Alberto cannot prove his claim. The incident is covered up.

content

In Lima, 15 to 17-year-olds from different parts of Peru meet. Ricardo is sent to the cadet institute by his father, a simple man, against his mother's wishes. Registration fees are payable. There are also recruits in the school. In contrast to the cadet, who is sent by the parents, the recruit is often drafted against his will. Ricardo's father wants to make a man out of his boy. Each graduate leaves school with a reserve officer license. Ricardo's hometown is an 18-hour bus ride from Lima. Alberto and the jaguar - resident of Lima - look down on the Serrano Porfirio Cava with contempt. Poor Cholo comes from the highlands. While the Jaguar has had a career as a burglar, 15-year-old Alberto comes from better-off circles. The father, a wicked womanizer from Ancash , will enable Alberto to study engineering in the USA after graduating from the cadet school. When Alberto brings very bad grades home from the cadet school, his angry father orders a private teacher for the school holidays. The 17-year-old half-orphan Teresa is staying with her aunt, who lives in dire poverty, and works as a typist in the city .

Already after entering the cadet school Ricardo had to endure all kinds of tortures and humiliations of the older cadet years as part of the "baptism" - this is something like an initiation . The jaguar, on the other hand, had founded the mafia and launched an organized counter-attack on the older students with its members. Given the choice, cadets prefer corporal punishment to the dreaded curfew.

When Ricardo is dying, his friend Alberto wants to visit him, but the paramedic does not let him in. Even the desperate parents who have traveled to the hospital are refused entry to the hospital room. The parents are led to believe that the son alone is to blame. He accidentally shot himself. The headmaster knows from the medical report that Cadet Ricardo Arana has been shot in the neck. After the death of the cadet, students from the class take turns on the wake in the chapel. Alberto is crying. He can't get over the death of his friend, visits Lieutenant Gamboa in his city apartment and accuses the jaguar of murder. He wanted to avenge Cava, claims Alberto, and shot Ricardo from behind. Because Alberto did not see that, Captain Garrido takes the statement as a guess and wants to make the whole story forget. Lieutenant Gamboa, who is present in the captain's office, remains firm. He insists on an investigation. The captain doesn't want to hear about it and arranges a roll call for clothes in the class dormitory. Prohibited items - such as cigarettes, alcohol, playing cards and duplicate keys - are extracted from the lockers. The angry cadets do not think Alberto is the traitor but the jaguar. Because the jaguar had threatened that he would blow his comrades up if Cava were removed from the school. The jaguar lets the accusation sit on itself. The colonel blackmailed Alberto with his novels. These are little pornographic pamphlets that Alberto wrote and sold to comrades. Alberto takes back the murder charge. In return, the incriminating writings are not made public. Locked in a cell in the dungeon during the lieutenant's unauthorized investigation, Alberto accuses the jaguar of murder and admits how he denounced the jaguar. The jaguar reportedly does not know that Ricardo betrayed Cava. Alberto believes this and asks the jaguar for forgiveness. The jaguar has nothing but contempt for Alberto.

Lieutenant Gamboa is transferred to Juliaca in the Puna . He leaves his 18-year-old pregnant wife with relatives in Lima. Before leaving, the jaguar confesses to Ricardo's murder. After Alberto withdrew his accusation, the lieutenant was no longer interested in the confession.

The Jaguar becomes a solid little bank clerk and marries his childhood sweetheart Teresa. Alberto has long since won over Marcela, his well-to-do bride. He will study in the USA, marry Marcela and, as Casanova, probably follow in his father's footsteps.

Form and interpretation

The novel consists of two parts and an epilogue.

In his first novel, Vargas Llosa sends the reader into an almost impenetrable thicket at the beginning of the text. After two hundred pages the text mess clears. There is a transparent criminal case (see above). However, Vargas Llosa does not clear up the case. Several perpetrators are possible. It could also have been an accident. The apostrophization as a detective novel does not do justice to the text. For example, in addition to the “normal” narrator, there are two mysterious, at first almost anonymous narrators who must first be recognized and repeatedly differentiated. This refers to the cadets Jaguar and Boa, who provide information about their childhood before attending military school. The Cholo Boa is usually pretty easy to spot. Sometimes he reveals his name and in almost every appearance he talks about the faithful bitch Malpapeada, whom he has taken to his heart. The jaguar is a case in itself. The reader is surprised at the mysterious narrator, but can only recognize him towards the end of the epilogue. This is where the skinny Higueras appears for the first time - a crook whose pranks the jaguar continuously tells about the whole novel. The jaguar also keeps talking about his sweetheart Tere. The reader soon suspects that this could mean Teresa.

In some later works, Vargas Llosa forced himself to be brief. The first fruit is not yet affected. Here are two examples. First of all, the inner monologues , mixed in motley with overflowing streams of consciousness , initially tempt you to put the book aside. The repeatedly inserted stories from the turbulent and criminal childhood of the first-person narrator Boa disturb the last third of the book. The reader asks himself: What function should these distracting fillers have towards the end of the novel?

Second, the flow of reading gets stuck in some passages of the dialogue due to the unconventional arrangement of the paragraphs. The reader can hardly tell who is speaking.

Occasionally the tense is changed.

In his verbose descriptions, Vargas Llosa hardly leaves out any - sometimes criminal - folly from everyday soldiers in barracks around the world. During the exit, younger cadets are successfully coerced by older cadets in the city bus to vacate their seats. The cadet spits into the food so he can keep it to himself. He stands in line in front of the establishment of the whore Pies Dorados and relieves himself as soon as it is finally his turn. When money is running out or the exit has been canceled, there is sometimes masturbation in the dormitory community or sodomism in the barracks area in times of need .

Even the description of deadly sad situations is not devoid of situation comedy. When, for example, Captain Garrido found the wounded Ricardo lying in the field, Vargas Llosa gave the thoughts of this officer in charge of the exercise. Garrido worries not only about the cadet, but also about the threatening note in his, up to now, clean personnel sheet. In general, the officer corps is not doing well at Vargas Llosa. Lieutenant Gamboa is the only officer with a backbone in the novel.

reception

  • Vargas Llosa admits to the figure of the "poet" (span. El Poeta) Alberto, autobiographical traits. Vargas Llosa became a cadet because his father did not tolerate a poet in the family. What applies to the unresolved criminal case also applies to the merely contrasting tension between the philosophies of life. Vargas Llosa observed wistfully how the adolescents would be forced to compromise by society.
  • The novel appears as a reflection of the disputes within the ethnic groups in the multi-ethnic state of Peru. The protagonists' rebellion against existing power relations fails. Ricardo's example shows how society expels a nonconforming member in the most brutal way.

filming

Lombardi 's film of the same name was shown in Peru on June 18, 1985. Premieres in Argentina, Canada, New York City, Hungary and France followed until 1990. Juan Manuel Ochoa played the Jaguar, Liliana Navarro played Teresa, Pablo Serra played Alberto, Eduardo Adrianzén played Ricardo and Gustavo Bueno played Lieutenant Gamboa. Vargas Llosa had worked on the script with José Watanabe .

Web links

literature

Used edition

  • The city and the dogs. Novel. Translated from the Spanish by Wolfgang A. Luchting. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980 (1st paperback edition). Translation in 1966 by Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, ISBN 3-518-37122-3

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

Remarks

  1. The edition used contains notes with explanations of terms, inter alia, of “Serrano” ( Sierra residents) and “Cholo” (edition used, p. 423, footnotes 2 and 11).
  2. The edition used is not free from printing errors (see for example edition used, p. 15, 13th line vu, p. 195, 11th line vu or p. 252, 17th line vu).

Individual evidence

Partly in English and Spanish

  1. Edition used, p. 4, 9th line vu
  2. eng. Military Academy Leoncio Prado
  3. Spanish well-known graduates of the military academy
  4. Scheerer, p. 12 above
  5. Scheerer, p. 36, 6th line from above
  6. Scheerer, p. 36, 15th line vo
  7. Lentzen, p. 17, 11th line from
  8. Lentzen, p. 25, 10th line above and p. 27, 2nd line from bottom
  9. Scheerer, p. 35, 4th line from
  10. Scheerer, p. 31, 12th line vu
  11. Scheerer, p. 20, 18th line from above
  12. Lentzen, p. 17, 12th line vu
  13. see for example the edition used, p. 209, 1st line vo
  14. ^ Lentzen, p. 164, 6th line from above
  15. see for example “ Who killed Palomino Molero? "
  16. see for example the edition used, p. 361, 4th line vo
  17. Edition used, p. 160, 12th line vu
  18. Lentzen. P. 40, 8th line from
  19. Spanish Alberto Fernández, “El Poeta”
  20. Scheerer, pp. 12-20
  21. Lentzen, pp. 17-19
  22. Lentzen, p. 30, 12th line vu
  23. Scheerer, p. 36, 10th line vu
  24. ^ Spanish. The city and the dogs (film)
  25. ^ Spanish Juan Manuel Ochoa
  26. ^ Spanish Gustavo Bueno