The War of the End of the World (review)

126 the minnesota review inevitably to be collective. If the Naipauls are to be believed, every collective assertion ariing from Third World countries is to be reviled as an empty statement voided of meaning by the delusions of illiterates. Alienation for V.S. and Shiva is so signally individual an experience that the thought ofoutcasts grouping together to oppose their marginal lot is utterly anathema. Counter-hegemony, after all, is not quite the Naipauls' kind of word. ROB NIXON The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. 568 pp. $18.95 (hardcover). Brazil, 1897: nine years after the emancipation ofslaves, eight after the declaration of the Republic. Three factions—militarists, civilian democrats, and wealthy landowners—are struggling for power. Meanwhile in the arid backlands of the northeast, behind the coastal fringe of Europeanized cities and towns, several thousand impoverished Brazilians are pursuing a political project of their own. The backlands are a region where blind forces of one kind or another— drought, plague, bandits, bandit chasers, the hacienda system—have left innumerable people dazed or demented, turned whole communities out on the roads to beg, or pray, or pillage. Heeding the call of the Counselor, a wandering prophet, some of these wretched people have gathered at the desolate settlement of Canudos to construct a Christian community, defy the godless forces of the secular Republic, and await the coming of Dom Sebastian, a medieval Portugese monarch who will shortly emerge from the sea, leading a shining army, to defeat the demonic secularists and usher in the Kingdom. Although Dom Sebastian's troops do not appear, others do—modest forces at first, and then, as the followers of the Counselor prove to be remarkable irregular warriors, larger and larger contingents, including one led by Colonel Moreira Cesar, hero of the faction that seeks to establish a "Dictatorical Republic" in Brazil. When the last battle is over, casualties are everywhere: the corpses of Brazilian soldiers hang from trees along the roads leading to Canudoes, roads bordered, in places, by lines of skulls. Canudos itself is a charnel house. And the contending political parties have all been greviously wounded. This, very briefly, is the history of the War of the Backlands, as told by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in his recently translated novel, The War of the End of the World. The story of this war, which actually occurred, has been told before, most notably in Oj Sertoes (1902) by Euclides da Cunha, a Brazilian journalist who followed the Brazilian army to Canudos. Oj Sertoes is one of the great works of Brazilian literature. Eminently readable, erudite, and impassioned, it has been compared by Stefan Zweig to T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Llosa's novel does not surpass da Cunha's history, but it complements it. The Canudos community was so spiritually and physically isolated, and its destruction was so complete, that da Cunha, observing it from behind the lines of the forces that beseiged it, has little to say about the Counselor, his followers, or their unique community. Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, exercises his prerogative as a novelist to range freely across the actual trenches and gaps of mutual incomprehension that divided the contending forces, so that in The War ofthe End ofthe World we become familiar not only with the aristocratic landowners of the Autonomist Party, the new military elite led by Moreira Cesar, and several ambitious Republican politicians, but also with the bandits, peasants, shopkeepers, misfits, and mystics gathered at Canudos. For Vargas Llosa, the seige of Canudos is an exemplary episode in the history of Latin America: what happened there, he declares in a recent interview, "is illustrative of our history. We have been killing one another for generations through blindness. In all our reviews 127 wars and oppressions, you find this total incapacity to understand the position ofthe adversary ." Blindness, misapprehension, and murderous intolerance characterize virtually every faction in Vargas Llosa's dramatization, and those who see with a modicum of clarity often choose to misrepresent the truth in the service of party interests. The antagonists all...