The Green House

(trying to write something in English to practice my writing skills, a bit rusty these days)

I understand why some people may not have the stomach for such reading.

La Casa Verde is a challenging book, not only due to the intricate prose (Faulknerian?) and the self-referential form of the narrative, requiring our diligent attention - but specially due to the violent, explicit and brutal content of the story. La Casa Verde is a book that tries to capture the brutality and melancholy of the dynamics of northern Peru in the first half of the century, and the form of the prose forces us to see the almost omnipresent and, somewhat, ominipotent presence of this brutality. There's something ineluctable in it, something utterly sad and unacceptable, but ultimately unescapable. There's almost no hope for no one - only lapses of empathy and tenderness that appear and disappear from time to time.

[SPOILER]

In the end, when Llosa presents us with La Casa Verde as a symbol of the rainforest - the brutal, the savage rainforest - the story ties up its final loose end. In the end, everything has changed, but no one can escape the past, the structural and mythical pressures of a place (in time and space) of such practical and symbolical force. And the book hits you hard, harder that ever before. With, once again, lapses of empathy: glimpses of hope. Yet, life must go on.

As the article “Tradução e Memória” (Translation and Memory) by Luiz Claudio Vieira de Oliveira states:

“[...] In La Casa Verde there is no such heroic, epic character. Instead, there is individualism; egotism, submission to imposed values, acceptance of fatality, amoralism: nothing heroic, in a way already ideologically predicted. There are not even heroes in La Casa Verde: There are anti-heroes.

So the reader is not relieved or gratified to see the hero accomplish what he, the reader, cannot or is not able do. The text does not solve the problem it poses, but, on the contrary, complicates it further. There is a social issue that remains unsolvable, tangled, labyrinthine: both in the jungle, in the desert and in Mangachería.” (https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/cltl/article/view/8036/5563)

(Just my interpretation and a very limited one, I must say. As a Brazilian that really doesn't know that much about the Peruvian history, unfortunately I can't offer a better perspective.)