The War of the End of the World

The War of the End of the World (La Guerra del Fin del Mundo) was published originally in Spanish in 1981 and translated into English in 1984. It is based both on the true events of the War of Canudos, which took place in Brazil between 1896 and 1897, and on Os Sertões (literally “the backlands,” published in English as Rebellion in the Backlands in 1957), an account of the war by Euclides da Cunha, a journalist who accompanied the military campaign. The author, Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian writer and a key player in the Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s that revolutionized South and Central American literature. Vargas Llosa’s work is politically charged, concerned with questions of power and violence. Like many of his novels, The War of the End of the World has a wide scope and a large cast of characters, reminiscent of the sweeping historical novels of the 19th century, while its complex interweaving of chronologies and points of view is distinctly modern. Other works by Llosa include The Feast of the Goat, The Discreet Hero, and The Time of the Hero.