Conversation in the Cathedral

"It was a difficult choice because he has written some 14 major novels. He is a writer who changes with every novel, adopting a range of different styles. But when I was reading around the Nobel prize, I learned that all the Nobel committee members read this novel when they were deliberating about the prize. And even though I have about four favourite novels of his, that seemed a good reason for picking this one. Conversation in the Cathedral represents a time in the late 1960s when Vargas Llosa was still very committed to the hope of radical social change in Latin America. In this novel he analyses the nature of a corrupt, unjust, hypocritical society that was the Peru of his adolescence, under a military regime. He thought that if you could expose the nature of the corruption you might move on and replace it with something better. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He finds ways of telling his stories which are really quite extraordinary in terms of their architecture, their formal complexity and elegance. The title sounds like a religious topic but actually the cathedral turns out to be a seedy bar in downtown Lima. The whole novel circles around a young man who accepts social failure because he can’t bear the world of his father and the world of the dictator [Manuel Odría] so he tries to opt out of it. He asks a question at the beginning of the novel, “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” and the novel tries to answer this question. The protagonist meets someone who used to be his father’s chauffeur and also, he discovers, his gay lover. They have a conversation over three or four hours, and as the conversation develops it moves back and forth in time and involves a polyphony of different voices. Vargas Llosa sometimes has the reputation, in novels like this, of being a “difficult” writer due to the scale of his ambition. But this is misleading. If you just persevere, you discover he is a great storyteller who drives the novel forward."