SOURCE: "Cinematography and The War of the End of the World," in Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa, University of South Carolina Press, 1990, 247 p.

Castro-Klarén is a Peruvian-born educator specializing in Latin American literature. In the following excerpt, she studies the plot of The War of the End of the World, comparing Vargas Llosa's narrative to Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões (1903), on which it is based.

In many of the interviews given by Mario Vargas Llosa since the publication of his first novel, The Time of the Hero, he has freely spoken of himself as a dedicated and voracious movie fan and of the influence that cinema has had on his narrative strategies. [In "The Green House: Formal Experimentation and Marginal Territories" in my Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa, Luis A. Diez and I have] endeavored to show how many of Vargas Llosa's narrative innovations are closely linked to...