Books: April 2025
La guerra del fin del mundo — Mario Vargas Llosa
⭐ The “end of the world” in the title refers to a remote town in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where a staggering 25,000 people, led by a messianic figure known as Antônio Conselheiro (“Anthony the Counselor”), lived in open defiance of the Brazilian state in the late 1800s. The town, Canudos – apparently now gone, flooded by a dam built in the 1960s – became the site of Brazil’s bloodiest civil war. Federal troops fought bitterly with residents, effectively exterminating the town’s inhabitants.
A messianic figure emerging in Brazil at this time, when the republic is just born and slavery is abolished; the unorthodox nature of the Counselor’s belief system (anti-republican, monarchical, anti-slavery, anti-metric system); the fact that residents successfully repel multiple waves of federal troops, killing a famous general – this background gave me very high expectations.
I was disappointed. What I wanted was someone who could extract meaning, give me a sense for what these people who gathered at Canudos wanted. This event is important, forgotten to history, but what does it mean? Vargas Llosa (RIP, one of the GOATs) does not seem to have a clear, convincing view.
The Counselor himself is sparsely detailed, doesn’t speak much, with obvious parallels to the biblical Jesus. The reader’s view of both the Counselor and his followers feels modern, removed: people with strange, cult-like beliefs. There is not a ton of room for empathy for them as believers. I wanted a sense for what it would feel like to believe what they believe, but we rarely get interiority.
The military side is similarly disappointing: there are debates about what the new republic should look like, a clash between modernizing liberalism and reactionary conservatism that is a turning point of Latin American politics. Yet Vargas Llosa makes it clear there is not much beyond cynicism on the military side.
In the end, the conflict feels more like a backdrop to a romance, with grand, sweeping emotions. As I read, the movie I kept coming back to was Gone with the Wind. That’s fine, but it didn’t grab me. A very long, dense book. A slog to get through.