Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, The Dream of the Celt [Faber & Faber, 2012], delves into the history of the colonisation of the Congo and Amazonia as well as the biography of Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist. Llosa questions the very validity of history many times in the novel.  Most history, implies the novelist, is a “more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality  a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals, advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipated or experienced by the protagonists” (109-110). A historical novel may be more accurate than documented history because the novelist looks at the events from a wider and deeper perspective than a historian.  For example, Sir Henry Stanley is portrayed in history as the heroic ...

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 charac...