![]() As in the Christian worldview, conditions are better at the top and worse at the bottom. In Machiguenga belief, the universe consists of five different levels or realms arranged in a vertical hierarchy, much like the Christian conception of the three realms of heaven, earth, and hell. To understand the culture, one must become familiar with its world-view. An egalitarian people without hierarchy or formal leadership, they do not engage in communal activities. The Machiguengas do not regard any region as their exclusive territory. They live in small groups of one to three families, forming a fixed settlement for a time and relocating every few years to find better hunting grounds or richer farmland. Their staple crop is manioc, a starchy root vegetable from which they brew masato, manioc beer. Traditionally, they reside in simple bamboo huts, dress in cotton tunics ( kushmas) dyed with tree bark, and subsist on slash-and-burn agriculture, bow-and-arrow hunting, and fishing. The Machiguengas live along the banks of the river tributaries that thread through the jungle and form the principal routes of transportation. In 1982 they numbered about 10,000 among the estimated 300,000 denizens of the jungle, which contains only about 10 percent of Peru’s population, even though it covers more than half the national territory. Within the jungle live the Machiguengas, one of the 65 distinct ethnic groups known to inhabit the Peruvian rainforest. As a source of gold, oil, lumber, rubber, cocaine, farmland, and new converts to Christianity, the jungle has attracted much attention in the centuries since Spanish conquest, yet due to its impenetrability it has remained largely untouched by “civilization.” Indeed, the contrast between the jungle and the rest of Peru is so stark that one might conceive of them as two distinct worlds sharing a national territory. Thus throughout Peru’s history, the montaña has been the nation’s great frontier, believed to hold untold riches in a variety of forms. In addition, torrential rains, dense vegetation, and an abundance of disease-bearing insects make the montaña resistant to exploration and colonization. ![]() The sheer slopes of the ceja form a formidable geographic barrier between the lower montaña and the rest of Peru. Home to indigenous tribes, the jungle is divided into two regions: the ceja de la montaña (eyebrow of the jungle) formed by the eastern slopes of the Andes, and the lower montaña or jungle proper. It is this mysterious jungle that is the focus of The Storyteller. Peru is a nation divided into three very different regions: the desert coast where the crowded city of Lima overflows with nearly a third of the national population the high Andes in which the descendants of the Incas farm their terraced hill side plots and the Amazon river has its source and the montaña, or Amazon rainforest, that covers the eastern half of Peru. Events in History at the Time of the Novel Peru and the world of the Machiguengas After his failed bid for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, Vargas Llosa entered a third phase marked by a seeming pessimism on his part about the effectiveness of political action in the face of human frailty. ![]() The Storyteller was written during this phase and exemplifies his rejection of Utopian notions of all stripes. Accordingly, he entered a neo-liberal phase during which he sought to strengthen artistic, political, and economic freedoms by actively supporting democracy and free market economics. In the 1970s, after witnessing the authoritarianism of Castro’s government as well as the authoritarian tendencies of the left in Peru, Vargas Llosa became disillusioned with the Latin American left in general. In the 1960s he was a Marxist who enthusiastically supported the Cuban revolution. Vargas Llosa’s career can be divided into three periods according to major changes in his political outlook. ![]() Though his fiction contains political and social commentary, for Vargas Llosa the novel is first and foremost a work of art. The Storyteller is the tenth published novel by Peru’s best-known living author, Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-). A novel set in Peru and Florence, Italy, from circa 1953 to 1985 published in Spanish (as El habladoñ in 1987, in English in 1989.Ī Peruvian writer composes a novel about a friend from the past who abandons his modern-day life and his study of ethnology to become a storyteller in an Amazonian tribe.Įvents in History at the Time of the Novel ![]()
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