Tough years
Harte Jahre is a historical novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner for literature, politician and journalist Mario Vargas Llosa , which was published in German in 2020 and tells the political history of Guatemala between around 1944 and 1957. The focus is on the democratic presidencies of Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951) and Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1951–1954) as well as the subsequent dictatorship of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1954–1957), who came to power through a coup planned by the CIA came.
content
The theme of the novel is the two democratic decades of Guatemala and their bloody end. The two elected presidents Arévalo and Árbenz represented social and liberal reform programs designed to reduce or abolish the dependence of the indigenous population on landowners as well as the illiberal restrictions of the press, parties and trade unions. The agrarian reform described as the core of this democratic decade (nationalization of fallow land in exchange for compensation and its distribution to landless farmers) activated the United Fruit Company (today Chiquita), the largest landowner in Guatemala, to a long-term and very effective campaign. Guatemala became a model case of the destabilization of a democracy through the manipulation of public opinion in the USA: In Guatemala a Soviet takeover was imminent, which had to be prevented in the name of democracy. This led to the planning and promotion of an ultimately successful military coup by the CIA against the elected government and the invasion of a US-paid mercenary army.
These events, their backgrounds and effects are narrated in assembled sequences as if for a screenplay that depicts the effects of capitalist interests and the American “ domino theory ” on Guatemala as a model of events that happened in one way or another in South America, Asia and Africa to have.
The transition from a liberal democracy without stable traditions to a renewed and unprecedented bloody military dictatorship was a turning point for Guatemala and the young intellectuals of the generation of Vargas Llosa. He clearly positions himself against this anti-democratic counter-revolution, which would presumably not have been successful without the support of the USA, formally the largest democracy on earth. The title “Hard Years” summarizes the experience of an entire continent that was unable to defend itself against the overwhelming power of the USA.
Narrative
The authorial narrator follows his protagonists, who are more or less based on historical personalities, very closely, as far as they deal with the politics of the country in their behavior and in their thoughts. The frequently used , experienced speech creates a personalized story of political maneuvers and intrigues that focuses on social structure, biographies and careers, traditions and political institutions - the narrative becomes a historical report.
The ensemble of figures is almost exclusively characterized by its political views. An exception is a female figure who connects the milieus of the left and the right, whose real role model the narrator interviewed during his research and describes in his epilogue; a second is one of the two murderers who, as a macho and misogynist, has to struggle with premature ejaculation during his frequent visits to brothels.
The language is not at the center of the literary design, the narrative accent is rather on the structure of the narrative: In an alternation of longer and shorter chapters, the complexity of the events arises through the nesting of storylines, the prehistory, the actual coup in 1954 and his Tell episodes. The longer chapters mostly contain the background of the events and provide character images, but are not always told chronologically, but with repetitions, from the perspective of other characters and with different accents. The narrative structure breaks through the narrative fiction with additional variants of the events, thus supporting the distance between the reader and the narrator and the possibility of an independent judgment.
In the short chronological chapters, which alternate regularly with them, the preparation and implementation of the assassination attempt on Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as well as the effects on his two murderers are told. As a figure of irony in history, the author finally lets their lives end in the same fear and violence to which they subjected their countless victims, a persistent trace of crimes that runs like an allegorical scar through the novel and Guatemalan history.
reception
For Rudolf von Bitter, after many extensive explanations, an “exciting adventure novel with plenty of action” develops.
According to Katharina Döbler, “with this novel the reader can learn a lot about the political and social network of Central America - and be carried away by its inner tension and its sensual descriptions.”
For Tobias Wenzel, Vargas Llosa “largely succeeds in staging this hair-raising historical event in a stirring way. It sounds like conspiracy theory, but it's well documented. "
Ole Schulz judges that the author was not able to "prepare the historical events as elegantly as usual. He gets lost in details."
Summaries of further reviews at Perlentaucher.de
Web links
- Rudolf von Bitter, Ghostly Darkened Time , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of April 23, 2020 [1]
- Katharina Döbler, A company that rules the country , in: Deutschlandradio from August 10, 2020 [2]
- Tobias Wenzel, New Book by Nobel Prize Winner Vargas Llosa: Hard Years , in: NDR on March 20, 2020 [3]
- Ole Schulz, Radicalized through the gringos, in: taz.de on June 20, 2020 [4]
- perlentaucher.de, Hard years. Novel [5]
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mario Vargas Llosa: Hard years . 1st edition. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-518-42930-3 , pp. 408 .
- ↑ Vargas Llosa, Harte Jahre, pp. 56 ff., 270 ff.
- ↑ Rudolf von Bitter: the plot could be "appreciated in the cinema (...)", but the beginning of the novel makes it "bulky".
- ↑ Vargas Llosa, Harte Jahre, mentions Greece on pp. 275 and 303.
- ↑ Tobias Wenzel mentions that these events led both Fidel Castro as well as the young generation of South America and initially Vargas Llosa to a radical left. After Ole Schulz, the events also radicalized Che Guevara, which Vargas Llosa also describes in his epilogue. (Vargas Llosa, Harte Jahre, p. 407 f.) The excessive exaggeration of social reforms as a socialist-communist revolution was therefore at least partially counterproductive from the point of view of the USA.
- ↑ "The bottom line is that the US intervention in Guatemala delayed the democratization of the continent for decades and killed thousands of people." (Vargas Llosa, Hard Years, p. 408)
- ↑ According to Tobias Wenzel, the reader gets the impression of being “an eyewitness to the key moments in Guatemala in the 1950s”.
- ↑ For Katharina Döbler the novel is "just as historical narration and documentation as the theses novel", for Tobias Wenzel the noticeable historical-journalistic research "unfortunately somewhat at the expense of literary quality".
- ↑ E.g. the accreditation of US Ambassador Peurifoy to President Arbénz on pages 75 and 265, the abdication of Arbénz and the hunt for his supporters on pages 134 ff. And 306 ff. And the murder of Colonel Armas on pages p. 152 and 231.