"The Cubs" by Mario Vargas Llosa -Project 196 Peru

"The Cubs" by Mario Vargas Llosa (1959, 29 pages)

Project 196

Peru

17 of 196 Countries

Mario Vargas Llosa

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobago 
8. Ukraine
9. Cameroon
10. Botswana
11. Sudan
12. Dominica 
13. Israel
14. Syria
15. Ethiopia
16. Zimbabwe
17. Peru

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

If you are a short story writer from Peru, I would like to publish your  story on my blog.  If you are interested in this please contact me.

One of the very best things about Project 196 for me has been discovering great new to me writers.  Some of these new to me writers are giants on the world literary stage and some are just starting their writing careers.    

Mario Vargas Llhosa (Peru, 1936) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.  He has had a long and very illustrious career as a writer and a political activist.  He ran for President of Peru (he lost) in 1990.   He is one of Latin America's most important contemporary writers.  "The Cubs" is my first exposure to his work and I am very glad to have discovered him  One of the great and the frustrating aspects of the reading life is that there are so many great writers out there we have never heard of and everyone else seems to know all about.   Or at least that is how it seems to me at times.  

There is an excellent article on Llosa in The Manchester Guardian.

"The Cubs" is a brilliant story that traces the lives of a group of young men, school day friends in Lima, from the start of puberty to middle age.   Llhosa does a great job of showing us the paths the boys take as they grown into men.  It is also a story about the destructive power of machismo. One of the cubs, the boys, is castrated in a tragic dog bite accident.   At first the boy does not really know what this will mean for his life but he is soon to find out as his friends age into puberty and acquire girl friends and have sort of sex with them.   The castrated boy is the wildest of the group.  His father was devastated by the accident to his only son and he indulged him way more than the other boy's fathers indulged them.  The other boys sort of leave the group and quit running the streets as they develop families and careers to support their own children.  This will not happen for Cuellar.  He begins to get in petty trouble with the police in incidents designed to prove how macho he is and he starts to run with people from the rough side of Lima, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes.  It was very sad to read of his friends graduating from college, marrying, having children and as time went on building vacation homes while he never advanced beyond the mentality of a macho teen.  

This is a very good story.  I am very glad I have discovered another great new to me writer.  Much of his work is available as eBooks in translation and in Spanish.  This story was translated by Gregory Kolovakos and Ronald Christ. 

Peru has a population of 30 Million.  

"Two Words" by Isabel Allende

"Two Words" by Isabel Allende (1989, 7 pages)

My middle daughter, Valerie, gave me a copy of The Penquin Book of International Women's Stories edited by Kate Figes for Christmas.  I was, of course, very happy to get it.  Yesterday I was looking through the book to see what countries for Project 196 might be found in the collection.  In the table of contents they have the country of the author next to their name and I saw "Isabel Allende-Peru" so I read the story and I am very glad I did.  She was born in Peru (1942) to parents from Chile who were serving as diplomats in Peru.  Her parents returned to Chile shortly after her birth and she has always been involved in writing about Chile (one of her cousins was elected President) and on her webpage it is clear she thinks of herself as Chilean. She has been an American citizen since 1993 and has lived in California since 1987.  Given this I decided not to count her as my writer from Peru for Project 196, in which I am posting on a short story from all 196 countries in the world.     That being said, Isabel Allende is a writer of tremendous popularity, with over 57 Million books sold, translations into 30 languages and numerous awards and honorary degrees.  You can learn more about her work and very interesting life on her webpage.

"Two Words" is one of her better know short stories.  It was in fact required reading at La Salle College, one of Manila's most prestigious universities last term in Junior English.  The story very much has the feel of Latin American magic realism.  The central female character is a woman who grew up as an orphan with no one to help her.   She learns the power of words and how to read, a very big thing in a largely illiterate society.  She makes her living by writing letters for people, with every letter she gives people two secret words to help protect them.  She rapidly develops her fame as a woman with a great ability to use words, to caste a spell with them.   The place she lives is rugged, nearly in a state of anarchy with  bands of bandits disguised as political groups roaming the countryside and terrorizing people at will.  One day the woman is kidnapped and brought to the command post of "The Colonel".  He has heard of her power with words and he wants her to write a speech for him, one he can give throughout the country to get himself elected president.   Where ever he goes people are mesmerized by the speech.  It also appears the woman has cast a spell on the colonel that made him fall in love with her. His second in command wants to kill her as a witch but the colonel will not have it.  I will leave the rest of the very intriguing story untold.

"Two Words" is a very interesting story and it is not hard to see from reading it why she has sold such a huge number of books.  I will hopefully be reading more of her work in 2013 and beyond.

Please share your experience with Isabel Allende with us