SOURCE: "Mario Vargas Llosa's The Green House: Modernist Novel from Peru," in The Modernists, Studies in a Literary Phenomenon: Essays in Honor of Harry T. Moore, edited by Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. MacNiven, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987, pp. 261-74.

In the following essay, Rossman studies The Green House as a modernist novel.

Mario Vargas Llosa spent the first nine years of his life outside his native Peru, in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Then, in 1945, he moved with his family to Piura, a provincial town in the coastal desert some five hundred miles north of Lima and nearly a thousand miles from his birthplace far to the south, Arequipa. The family spent only a year in Piura before moving on to Lima. Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa remembers that year as the most formative period of his life.

In Piura, a startling new world engraved itself on the nine-year-old's imagination. There...