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Carregando... Tempos duros (2019)de Mario Vargas Llosa
   Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.   ) bookomaniac | Jan 27, 2022 |  Vargas Llosas politischer Roman umfasst einen Zeitraum von fast 15 Jahren, beginnend mit den ersten demokratischen Wahlen in Guatemala 1945 bis zur von Trujillisten geplanten Ermordung des 1954 an die Macht geputschten Diktators Carlo Castillo Armas. Insbesondere untersucht der Autor, angereichert mit fiktiven Elementen und aus den jeweiligen Blickwinkeln der Hauptprotagonisten die Operation PBSUCCESS, sohin die erste Geheimdienstoperation der USA im Rahmen derer Rollback-Politik im kalten Krieg. Vargas Llosas Werk fast ist fast mehr politisch-historisches Essay und Anklage, die Handlung verlässt den eigentlichen Schauplatz Guatemala und bietet einen Ausblick auf die Auswirkungen der antikommunistischen Rollback-Politik auf ganz Zentralamerika. "Harte Jahre hat allerdings auch Schwächen: Anders als bei seinem Meisterwerk "Das Fest des Ziegenbocks", dessen Handlung in derselben Region angesiedelt ist und dessen Hauptprotagonisten in beiden Romanen auftreten, gelingt es Vargas Llosa nicht ganz so gut, die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven und Zeitebenen zu verknüpfen. Wie andere Werke Vargas Llosas besteht auch der vorliegende Roman aus einer Konstruktion verschiedener Blickwinkeln und Zeitebenen. Doch im vorliegenden Fall fehlt das sonst so meisterhaft betriebene Zusteuern dieser unterschiedlichen Perspektiven auf einen gemeinsamen Höhepunkt. "Harte Jahre" ist nichtsdestotrotz fesselnd, lehrreich, gut recherchiert und kurzweilig, kann es jedoch nicht dem vorgenannten Roman "Das Fest des Ziegenbocks" und anderen Meisterwerken des Autors aufnehmen. (  ) schmechi | Nov 29, 2021 | With the support of the Eisenhower administration, notably the Dulles brothers and Guatemala’s creepy U.S. ambassador (John Peurifoy), a propaganda campaign was built around a “big lie” (i.e., that Guatemala was about to provide a foothold in the Western Hemisphere for Russian communism). Llosa claims there was little evidence for this. The marginally competent Lt. Col. Carlos Castillo Armas was installed as the successor to Árbenz and the bulk of the novel revolves around a successful conspiracy to remove Armas by assassination. Llosa puts a human face on the Armas assassination by following the activities of largely fictitious coup plotters. Martita Borrero Parra is a particularly intriguing figure. Known as Miss Guatemala, despite never actually holding that title, she was impregnated at 14 by one of her father’s best friends. Papa disowned her and arranged a shotgun wedding. The marriage subsequently failed, Martita abandoned her child and eventually became Armas’ mistress. Her involvement in the murder is murky, but following the assassination, she sought safe harbor in Trujillo’s Dominican Republic. Llosa ends his novel with a fascinating epilogue where he interviews Martita at her home in Florida as a septuagenarian. He is too good a writer to answer every question surrounding Miss Guatemala, so much is left to the reader’s imagination. Another fascinating creation is Johnny Abbes García. He is installed by Trujillo as chief of his military intelligence service and sent to Guatemala to orchestrate the Armas assassination. Trujillo’s motives for this are unclear but seem to involve perceived slights. Johnny and a “gringo who probably was not called Mike” worked to accomplish the task and eventually to extricate Martita from the country. Llosa also describes the gruesome fate of Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Armas’ director of security, following the assassination. Oliva may (or may not?) have been implicated in the plot, but clearly was a scapegoat. He, along with Garcia and Peurifoy, eventually get their just deserts. The novel is a wild ride filled with lots of dirty deeds along with some important insights. In point of fact, Llosa believes that the two most dastardly figures in the whole sorry saga were Sam Zemurray and Edward L. Bernays. The former was the founder of United Fruit, and the latter was a PR guru he hired to spread the big lie. More importantly, he believes that this act likely hindered democratization and contributed to corrupt, violent and undemocratic systems that persist to this day in the region. Despite some murkiness resulting from the inherent complexity of the story, as well as Llosa’s use of a non-linear timeline and multiple perspectives in his often ironic and sexy narrative, the novel moves along at a swift pace and is a satisfying read. ( )1  ozzer | Oct 21, 2021 | Wo | Jul 6, 2021 |  ) marzagao | Jun 1, 2021 |
 This is the kind of novel that mocks the give-it-10-pages, I-need-to-be-grabbed-because-life-is-too-short school of reading. Even those of the trust-the-artist, persevere-and-stand-fast persuasion should prepare to be tested. I confess: I was confused, bewildered, lost. I wrote down the names of the characters. I backtracked. I cross-tracked. I re-tracked. The shape of the narrative only really began to declare itself around page 90. But then … oh, what an engaging education Harsh Times turned out to be, and how I came to look forward to my time in its company.  There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other, an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, was known inside the country as the Octopus, because it had tentacles everywhere. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, and it controlled the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. U.S. State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. Senators held stock. Running United Fruit’s publicity department, in New York, was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the U.S., to say nothing of the countries under American sway. By 1952, the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was fighting a battle he couldn’t win. He was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades—it had also secured a guarantee that it would never have to pay its employees more than fifty cents a day. To address the country’s rampant inequalities, including its feudal labor system, Árbenz passed an agrarian reform law to convert unused private land into smaller plots for peasants. A moderate institutionalist, he argued that the law reflected his capitalist bona fides. Weren’t monopolies considered anathema in the U.S., too? In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the U.S. government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It was the start of the Cold War, which made American officials into easy marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953. Over the following year, the C.I.A. and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” force against the government. They eventually landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan military officer with dark, diminutive features and a toothbrush mustache, who came across as flighty and dim. (“He looked like he had been packaged by Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator said at the time.) His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him. In June, 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the U.S. Ambassador, he was rewarded with the Presidency. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, but not before Castillo Armas forced him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the plane. The 1954 C.I.A. coup and its aftermath are the subject of “Harsh Times” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a new novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, which has been translated by Adrian Nathan West. PrêmiosNotable Lists
"The true story of Guatemala's political turmoil of the 1950s as only a master of fiction can tell it"-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)863.64Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.75)
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