Harsh Times: A Novel
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Guatemala, 1954. The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo ├Бrbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that ├Бrbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.
In this thrilling novel, Mario Vargas Llosa fuses reality with two fictions: that of the narrator, who freely re-creates characters and situations, and the one designed by those who would control the politics and the economy of a continent by manipulating its history.
Harsh Times is a gripping, revealing novel that directly confronts recent history. No one is better suited to tell this riveting story than Vargas Llosa, and there is no form better for it than his deeply textured fiction. Not since The Feast of the Goat, his classic novel of the downfall of TrujilloтАЩs regime in the Dominican Republic, has Vargas Llosa combined politics, characters, and suspense so unforgettably.
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Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature тАЬfor his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individualтАЩs resistance, revolt, and defeat.тАЭ He also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking worldтАЩs most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.
Adrian Nathan West is a novelist, an essayist, and a translator based in Spain. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, McSweeneyтАЩs, and more. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and a contributing editor at the translation journal Asymptote.
