The young dogs
The young dogs ( Spanish: Los cachorros (Pichula Cuéllar) ) is a short story by the Peruvian Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa , which was written from 1965 to 1966 and published in 1967.
action
The young dogs are five schoolmates from Miraflores in Lima . One of them, little Cuéllar, has an accident at Colegio Champagnat after a football game. Judas the mastiff enters the school locker room and emasculates the boy with a bite between his legs. No doctor can help. The wealthy father turned to foreign specialists for years - without success.
After the accident, Cuéllar is no longer a class leader, but teachers, parents and his four school friends Lalo, Choto, Mañuco and Chingolo are and will remain indulgent. The friends nicknamed Cuéllar the tail. Over time, he gets used to the name and even introduces himself to new students as "Schwanz Cuéllar".
After years, when the four friends one after the other conquer a girl, Cuéllar suddenly talks badly about the preppy friends. Thus, he incurs the resentment of his schoolmates. The friends want to get Cuéllar a girlfriend. Nothing will come of it. Cuéllar's exaltations increase. He races through Lima like a madman in his Ford Cabriolet, a present from his father. He shyly avoids the girls. He starts to stutter.
Everything turns for the better when the beautiful, blonde Teresita Arrarte tolerates his approach. To the disappointment of the four friends and their girlfriends, Cuéllar does not explain himself to the coquettish Teresita.
The Ford models that Cuéllar drives get more powerful over the years. Cuéllar is becoming more and more eccentric and exaggerated. After Teresita has heard the young Cachito Arnilla, Cuéllar's bad habits take over. He's now working in his father's company and after work he walks around with shady characters. For his 21st birthday, Cuéllar receives a powerfully motorized Nash from his father .
The friends marry their girlfriends, graduate as engineers and Cuéllar while away the time with 14-year-old youngsters. After a few bad car accidents, he dies "in the bad corners of Pasamayo" in his last accident.
shape
The short text is presented transparently and easily manageable. So the playful games with syntactic structures don't bother either. For example, when Vargas Llosa writes: “But the weeks went by and we when, tail, and he tomorrow”, then the reader thinks of good will where the quotation marks et cetera could be.
The narrator says "we". The context shows that he can only come from among the four classmates mentioned above.
reception
- Oviedo quotes Benedetti : The story is about the destruction of the protagonist. Cuéllar would not die from the dog bite, but from the bites of the group. According to Julio Ortega, the author wrote a story about a failed social integration. Cuéllar does not take part in the amusement of his school friends with the cultivated young girls, but steadfastly refuses. Vargas Llosa got the material from the newspaper. Oviedo attributes the parents of the pupils described to the petty bourgeoisie in Lima.
- From a formal point of view, Scheerer values the narrative highly. The time told is more than twenty years. The five boys are portrayed from around the age of nine.
filming
The film "Los cachorros" by Jorge Fons premiered on May 10, 1973 in Mexico. José Alonso played the Cuéllar and Helena Rojo the Teresita Arrarte.
literature
Used edition
- The young dogs (tail Cuéllar). Narrative. German by Wolfgang Alexander Luchting. With an afterword by José Miguel Oviedo , explanations by the translator and notes. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1975 (1st paperback edition 1991 (st 1841)), ISBN 978-3-518-38341-4
Secondary literature
- Thomas M. Scheerer : Mario Vargas Llosa. Life and work. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38289-6
annotation
- ↑ A little bit of reading relief provided something like the following punctuation: But the weeks passed and we: "When, then, tail", and he: "tomorrow".
Individual evidence
- ^ Oviedo in the edition used, p. 69, 10. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 4
- ↑ Spanish Serpentín de Pasamayo (edition used, p. 61, 13. Zvo)
- ↑ Edition used, p. 49, 10. Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 25, 2nd Zvu
- ^ Oviedo in the edition used, p. 75, 3rd Zvu
- ^ Spanish Julio Ortega
- ^ Oviedo in the edition used, p. 78, 1. Zvu
- ^ Oviedo in the edition used, p. 76, 11. Zvu
- ^ Oviedo in the edition used, pp. 71, 17. Zvo
- ↑ Scheerer, p. 37, 9. Zvo
- ↑ Scheerer, pp. 37-38
- ^ Spanish José Alonso
- ^ Spanish Helena Rojo
- ↑ Los cachorros in the English IMDb
- ↑ Edition used, pp. 69–92
- ↑ Edition used, pp. 65–67
- ↑ Edition used, pp. 93–94