http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/im... Subject: " story teller "the ultimrte tribute you can pay to a culture is to adopt and embrace it unconditionallyhere is a NY Times review without giving away too much of the suspenseful conclusion of the bookoh, a diferent book cover from an earlier publication - awesome !!Feeling the Hot Breath of Civilization By URLSUAL K. LE GUIN--------------------------------------------------------------------------------THE STORYTELLER By Mario Vargas Llosa.Translated by Helen Lane. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------e human beings long to get the world under our control and to make other people act just like us. In the last few centuries, some of us - variously described as the White Man, the West, the Colonial Powers, Industrial Civilization, the March of Progress - found out how to do it. The result is that now many of us all over the world are eating hamburgers at McDonald's. Since other results include forests destroyed for pasture for the cattle to make the hamburgers, and oceans suffocated by the waste products of making plastic boxes for the hamburgers, the success of the White Man's control of the world is debatable; but his success in making other people act just like him is not. No culture that has come in contact with Western industrial culture has been unchanged by it, and most have been assimilated or annihilated, surviving only as vestigial variations in dress, cooking or ethics. To make this tremendous process of acculturation the central subject of a novel is a tremendous undertaking. Mario Vargas Llosa is not a tremendous novelist, but he is a wise and canny one, and very skilled. His fascinating new book opens this subject, the impact of ''civilization'' on the ''primitive,'' to intellectual consideration in the novelistic mode of passionate emotional and moral involvement. Translated into beautifully easygoing English by Helen Lane, ''The Storyteller'' is science fiction at its best. Accurately following the investigations of a science - anthropology, in this case - as far as they have gone, it then asks: what if? What if there were (and indeed there is) a remote Amazonian tribe that had kept itself unacculturated, so far, by moving away from the Incas, the conquistadors, the Jesuits, the evangelists, the rubber planters, the tree cutters and the anthropologists, by keeping on the move, not running but walking? ''The men who walk,'' the Machiguenga call themselves. And what if a young Jew at the University of Lima became intrigued by these people and began to follow them farther and farther into the jungle and into the spirit, until he became himself a man who walks? More than one voice tells this story. The first is that of a thoughtful, amiably cynical Peruvian, in Florence ''to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while,'' who sees in a gallery the photograph of a storyteller of the eastern Peruvian Amazon amid a circle of women and men: ''They were absolutely still. All the faces were turned, like radii of a circumference, toward the central point: the silhouette of a man at the heart of that circle of Machiguengas drawn to him as to a magnet, standing there speaking.'' The narrator recognizes in that silhouette his old college friend Saul Zuratas. And so he begins to tell the story of the storyteller, for this is a book of and about stories, the stories that history silences, the stories of the obscure, the private, the prehistoric; and it all centers on that point, the person at the heart of a circle of people, speaking. So, circling back to college days, he tells us about Saul, Mascarita, ''Mask Face'' - the student with a terrible purple birthmark over half his face, the bright, funny, gentle, half-Jewish ethnologist with a pet parrot called Gregor Samsa. And with him we begin to circle around that question of acculturation, of the fatal impact of the industrial West on the wilderness and the so-called savage. Saul asks his friend: ''Do our cars, guns, planes, and Coca-Colas give us the right to exterminate them because they don't have such things? Or do you believe in 'civilizing the savages,' pal? How? By making soldiers of them? By putting them to work on the farms as slaves? . . . By forcing them to change their language, their religion, and their customs, the way the missionaries are trying to do? What's to be gained by that? Being able to exploit them more easily, that's all.'' But Saul does not fall into the Noble Savage trap. Finding many customs of the Machiguengas self-destructive, unjust and cruel, he sees them as no more superior to us than we are to them, though their practices, following the patterns and needs of the world more closely than ours, do far less violence. But women are worse used among them even than among us, and they kill babies born with the least blemish, in superstitious fear. Why then does he passionately defend them? Because he is ''half Jewish and half monster'' and so identifies with the outcast and the underdog? But had he been born among them he would have been killed at birth, and he knows it. This is a tale of a researcher gone native. The term is used derogatively by anthropologists, for to go native is to lose the perspective, the observer status that is essential to the practice of any science. But scientific detachment is itself in question when it reduces human beings to objects, pretending that the trained mind can understand human behavior without bias, without participation, without imagination and without moral concern. No novelist is likely to let such a pretense go unchallenged. Certainly the concerns of ''The Storyteller'' are intellectual, ethical and artistic, all at once and brilliantly so. To me this is Mr. Vargas Llosa's most engaging and accessible book, for the urgency of its subject purifies and illuminates the writing. I was spellbound, as if by the voice of that storyteller in the circle of listeners; his voice is many voices, his voice is the tribal voice: ''After, the men of earth started walking, straight toward the sun that was falling. Before, they too stayed in the same place without moving. The sun, their eye of the sky, was fixed. . . . There was no war. The rivers were full of fish, the forests of animals. . . . The men of earth were strong, wise, serene and united. They were peaceable and without anger. Before the time afterwards.'' We live, and our story is told, in ''the time afterwards'' - after the Fall, after the Exodus, after the Dreamtime. The author, in a masterly interweaving of actual myth and novelistic imagination, takes us directly and immediately into the Machiguenga world, yet never presumes to speak as one of them. There is no observer and observed here, only participation - which is what storytelling is all about. To hear the Machiguenga stories, to participate in that life, is an experience of horror, exhilaration, beauty, great strangeness and deep concern. Encircled by their fierce cosmogony and the fearful legends of their past, we begin to walk with them; we begin to understand why they must walk, must never cease moving on: so that the sun will rise, so that the world will be in order, so that the obligation will be fulfilled. For these too are a chosen people: ''For a family and for a people too, the worst evil would be not knowing their obligation. . . . If an evil occurs on the earth, it's because people have stopped paying attention to the earth, because they don't look after it the way it ought to be looked after. . . . How do we help the sun, the rivers? How do we help this world, everything that's alive? By walking. I've fulfilled the obligation, I believe.'' But if the missionaries and linguists and ethnologists respectfully let this tiny group of people walk away from them, what protection will they have against the worst of our civilization? There is nowhere left for them to walk to. They are defenseless against helicopter, bullet, bulldozer, exploitation, enslavement and genocide. The question that could be put off, walked away from, has become unavoidable. And here Mr. Vargas Llosa, who is running for President of Peru, speaks with an authority almost unique to the novelists and poets of Latin America, whose responsibility is wider and more public than that of our writers, and more overtly political. He names the new evils of our day: ''First came the oil wells. . . . Later on, or at the same time, the drug traffic began and, like a biblical plague, spread its network of coca plantations, laboratories, and secret landing strips, with - as a logical consequence - periodic killings and vendettas between rival gangs of Colombians and Peruvians; the burning of coca crops, the police searches and wholesale roundups. And finally - or perhaps at the same time, closing the triangle of horror - terrorism and counterterrorism. Detachments of the revolutionary Sendero Luminoso movement, severely repressed in the Andes, have come down to the jungle and operate in this part of Amazonia, now periodically reconnoitered by the Army and even, it is said, bombarded by the Air Force.'' The Inca and Spanish invasions, the enslavements, the missionaries' efforts to corrupt culture, the exploitations by profiteers of rubber and wood and gold and land, and now this. ''For the Machiguengas, history marches neither forward nor backward: it goes around and around in circles, repeats itself.'' And now we are in that circle with them. The horrible triangle of environmental rape, drug traffic and political terrorism is the trap we too are caught in. What are we to do? Shall we, like them, ''start walking'' - shall we remember our obligation to one another and the earth? Although in the Machiguenga language ''now'' means both the present and the past, leaving only the future clearly defined, the storyteller does not presume to foretell, to say what will happen next. In the gallery in Florence one of the storytellers watches another of them go into the shadows, like a shadow, with ''the men who walk.'' All we know is that as he goes he is telling a story. TALKING TO THE FIREFLIES ''I felt odd, talking to some little lights that kept going on and off without answering me. . . . At last, one night, after many nights, it happened. . . . Sounds different from the sounds of the forest. . . . Murmurs, whispers, laments.'' . . . That's how it came about, it seems. Tasurinchi and the fireflies . . . now spend their nights talking together. The seripigari tells them about the men who walk and they tell him their eternal story. . . . They lost their happiness many moons ago, though they go on glowing nonetheless. Because all the fireflies here are males. That is the misfortune that has befallen them. Their females are the lights in the sky above. That's right, the stars. . . . Look at them, just look at them. Little lights blinking on and off. The same as words to them, perhaps. . . . All around us, they're telling each other how they lost their women. . . . They spend their lives remembering their misfortune and cursing Kashiri, the moon. From ''The Storyteller.'' Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of ''Dancing at the Edge of the World.'' --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am a great fan of Mario Vargas Llosa but I was disappointed in this book, not so much for its subject matter but in the way it was presented.In the opening chapter, the unknown narrator (Llosa?) who is only referred to as “pal” or “old boy,” comes across a painting in Florence depicting the Machiguenga Indians of Peru. The painting portrays a white-skinned oral storyteller with red hair, a disfiguring birthmark on his face, sitting in the middle of a circle of Machiguenga. The narrator wonders if this his old friend from university, Saul Zuratas, Mascarita as he was nicknamed, a Jew, who supposedly vanished to Israel after rejecting a post-graduate scholarship in ethnological studies.This intriguing opening then departs along two story lines, each with its own style: one depicts the narrator’s journalistic account of his hunt for Mascarita by embarking on various expeditions into the Amazon, the other is a profusion of mythological tales about the origins of the Machiguenga, which appear to be coming from the mysterious storyteller himself. Llosa used this dual narrative approach in his previous novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to much greater effect by converging them in the end, but in this novel the two threads do not quite meet.The journalistic narrative is flat and lacks conflict and is full of extraneous detail. The mythological one is dreamlike and merges one story into another; mixed in is the story of Creation, the story of Jesus, the coming of the white man to South America and bits of Dante’s Inferno, and one wonders – given this is being narrated by a red haired white man – if the storyteller is cloaking western mythology in Amazonian imagery. The storyteller is colourful in his descriptions of earthquakes, plague, gods, slitting of bellies to pluck out babies, women bearing fish from their loins, shit fights and the constant migration that the Machiguenga are consigned to. “Diaspora is survival,” seems to be the lot of the Amazonian tribes and of the storyteller as he wanders the Amazon forests telling his tales. The imagery of the mythological narrative is graphic at times: “his farts were like thunder, his belches like the jaguar’s roar...” Despite these colourful visuals however, one wonders if it is hubris on the part of the author or the translator’s lack of skill for why there are so many native words in the storyteller’s recounting; it is quite disruptive to the flow of this English translation and does not in any way enhance its uniqueness.Mascarita’s voluntary conversion to the Amazonian way of life is his act of total rejection of Western civilization and its technology. His assimilation into a pre-historic lifestyle is indicative of our ability to delayer as humans and return to our origins. His affinity to the Machiguenga is reflective of his being Jewish and living with the badge of persecution just as his new hosts do. Llosa makes some insightful connections here.And yet for all its profundity, I wish this book had been written differently. Some fundamental principles of the novel – character, conflict and story – are sacrificed in favour of giving us the grand panorama of Machiguenga legend, leaving me with a question: would this narrative have been better written as a no-nonsense, non-fiction history of the indigenous tribes of the Peruvian Amazon, instead of as a flat novel with a jumble of myths?
What do You think about The Storyteller (2001)?
Every now and then a news item appears about the discovery of some remote Amazon tribe that survives in a pristine, Neolithic state. The stories occur less and less, as fewer and fewer tribes remain untouched by the modern world. Disease and development have devastated most.What is lost in this process of destruction? Does it matter if a Neolithic people, their entire language and culture, is lost or transformed? Is there anything that these peoples, so separated by superstition and suspicion, can teach us? For their own good, should we gradually introduce them to our world and ways or leave them to subsist in isolation in the rain forest?These are questions that inevitably surface as you read Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller, first published in 1987 as El hablador. The Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist was ahead of his time writing what might be described as an ecological novel. For the questions he raises are about the delicate balance of an entire ecosystem, of a people and the environment that sustains them, where the essential tool for group survival is the knowledge passed down through storytelling.Vargas Llosa approaches this complex issue through the first-person narrative of a Peruvian novelist and documentary film producer who while traveling to Florence, Italy stumbles upon an exhibit of photographs of the Machiguenga tribe in the Amazon. It’s a tribe he knows firsthand, and one photo in particular sends him reeling back in time to his university-days friendship with Saul “Mascarita” Zuratas. Mascarita, a Peruvian of Jewish descent with a face stained by a birthmark, became obsessed with the Machiguenga as an anthropology student and disappeared from the narrator’s life years before. In the photo in the exhibition, the narrator believes he has seen the stained face of his old friend, dressed like a Machiguenga, at the center of a circle serving as a tribal storyteller. Could it really be him?Vargas Llosa is always willing to experiment with narrative form. In this novel he makes a “qualitative leap in reality” (a phrase Vargas Llosa borrowed from Hegel to describe this narrative device in his primer on fiction writing, Letters to a Young Novelist) by shifting between two narrators, one being the novelist in Italy recalling his old friend in Peru, and the second being an anonymous storyteller narrating the stories of the Machiguengas. It’s a bold move and Vargas Llosa succeeds in the enormous challenge of creating the magical and dreamlike narrative of the Machiguenga genesis.This is a book of ideas, of two “communicating vessels” (to use another Vargas Llosa term) that try to elevate those ideas. But, for me, he failed to deliver an engaging story. The novel lacks tension because the novelist-narrator reveals where the story is going in the first few chapters and there are few surprises or conflicts. Nor is there any significant character development, although the anonymous storyteller does become amusingly creative, embellishing Machiguenga myths with stories from Kafka and the Old Testament. As accomplished as the writing is, ultimately these weaknesses led to my disappointment.At one point in the story the novelist-narrator describes how he struggled to write a book about his experiences in the Amazon but somehow his notes on his encounters with the Machiguengas always failed to come together. One senses that Vargas Llosa struggled with the same problem. Storytelling has its own ecosystem, requiring a delicate balance of tension, development and unpredictability; it requires more than ideas, which are often better presented in an essay. For this reader, the writer failed at the most important task of storytelling—to beguile his audience.
—Tom
The story's narrator visits an art gallery where there is an exhibit of photographs of the Machiguenga, an indigenous Amazonian tribe living in southeastern Peru. The Machiguenga are gathered around a storyteller who looks like Saul Zuratas, his friend when he was a university student. Zuratas had been called Mascarita (Mask face) because he had a port wine birthmark covering half his face. The narrator realizes that Mascarita had left the modern world to live with the Machiguenga. Although the native tribe killed babies born with physical problems, they were very accepting of adults with deformities.The narrator tells about the discussions that he and Mascarita, an ethnology student, had about the effects of modern civilization on the native tribes in the 1950s. Should the Machiguengas be kept away from Western ideas, or would they have a better life if they could form villages and become part of the modern world? The indigenous tribes had often been exploited, especially by the rubber industry. Missionaries were destroying native cultures. Linguists and anthropologists were exposing them to Western ideas. Is a hybrid culture impossible to avoid? The narrator tells about the controversy surrounding the interaction of Western and indigenous peoples in half the chapters of the book.The alternating chapters of the book are set in the Amazon basin as Mascarita, the storyteller, visits small groups of the Machiguenga. At first, he just tells stories of their traditions and history that he learned during his travels. Many of the stories are fables full of taboos and superstition. They often revolve around gods like the sun, moon, and other forces of nature. Eventually Mascarita incorporates Western ideas such as stories from the Bible, and even Kafka's "Metamorphosis" into his stories. Although Mascarita wanted to completely leave the modern world to live with the indigenous people, he unconsciously started practicing cultural hybridism in his storytelling. Mascarita comes from a Jewish family, and there are parallels between the Exodus of the Jews, and the walking of the Machiguenga further into the Amazon jungle as they are displaced by modern civilization.Mario Vargas Llosa gives the reader lots to think about as he shows both sides of the controversy concerning modern influences on native cultures. The sections of the book with the fables could have been shortened a bit while still giving the reader a good idea of the lives of the Machiguenga. Overall, the book presented a cultural controversy in an interesting, original story.
—Connie
Maybe if I went back and read it now when my mind wasn't clouded by how much I hated everything about Global I might like the book more, but I really don't think so. Haha!
—Sara
