The novel that I started reading yesterday and keeps my attention riveted is Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2012). Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years ago. The reason why I bought this novel of his is not that, however. The novel is about Roger Casement, a controversial hero of Irish nationalism. My reason for buying the novel was not that either. I ordered for the book when I read in a review that the novel was about the barbarism perpetrated by the European colonists in the Congo. Llosa’s protagonist was an Irishman who went to the Congo with the noble desire to “civilize” the people there. A few pages into the novel, I am quite delighted to come across Joseph Conrad as a character. Conrad was a sailor and he met Roger in the Congo. In Llosa’s novel, Conrad tells Roger that the latter “should have appeared as co-author” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . In Heart of Darkness , a character named Marlow tells the story of Kurtz to
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