To enter Mario Vargas Llosa=s The Green House is to enter a maze of oddly configured and strangely constructed rooms. Doors lead to closed corners; windows open onto under-sized courtyards; hallways end in boxy closets. But hiding in those closets is always a bright speaker who tells the patient reader more of this vivid and unforgettable story.

My own venture into The Green House was confusing as I tried to navigate its entangled architecture. The book begins on a river in the Peruvian section of the Amazon jungle. In a boat on that river are two nuns piloted by a rowdy crew of police and military men. While the sisters are easy to distinguish, the men seem to melt into the landscape of harried talk and a flood of visual observation. No narrator asserts himself here in the opening pages of the book. On the contrary, this section seems to lack the kind of bridling an author would give it. The first thirteen pagesBthe whole of the first sectionBcontain not a single paragraph break. This wash of text wearied my eyes and left my head spinning as I tried to separate the male characters called simply, ABlacky,@ AFats,@ ABlondy,@ AShorty,@ and ANieves.@ I wanted someone to tell me who was importantBwhich character I should note for future reference. More so, I wanted someone to tell me what was going on.

If Mario Vargas Llosa somehow anticipated my response to his text, then he must have been counting on my patience, for in the next chapter of The Green House he does little to resolve my readerly anxieties. He does shift to a more standard narrative. He tells me to whom each piece of dialogue belongs, and carefully assigns both action and thought to the nuns who are excited over a recent event at their mission school. Still, even their animated discussion is interrupted by omniscient scene-setting that seems one part travelogue and one part local gossip.

But before I can make sense of the new characters these sisters encounter, Vargas Llosa cuts to a different scene entirely. An extra space and a typographer=s rosette visually signal the break, which the author does little to bridge with an instructive narrator=s voice. The sisters are suddenly gone, and in their place are Fushía and Aquilino, who seem so unrelated to what has gone before them, they assert their belonging only by the flavor of their dialogue and the persuasiveness of their characterization. Fushía is a Brazilian with Japanese ancestry who tells his friend, Aquilino, how he escaped from prison. His narration of the escape is instantlyBand cinematicallyB foregrounded. No omniscient narrator cues us to the switch, but suddenly the characters of the escapeBChango, IricuoBare speaking as though they were present, though their dialogue comes most certainly from Fushía=s mind.

Or does it? The whole of the book follows this pattern established in the opening pages. In the magical rooms of The Green House, past and present occur together. Rather, past and present are one in their telling. What happens first is never what is told first, and every presumed beginning is instead the very end of something begun much earlier. This is the only way to characterize Aquilino and Fushía=s conversation at the book=s beginning. What the reader does not yet knowBand cannot tellBis that she is being introduced to the end of these characters= stories. She won=t know their beginning until the Aend@ of the book.

Already, those two termsBend and beginningBseem useless when discussing Vargas Llosa=s pivotal work. Equally unproductive would be a summary of any kind. To extract a point by point answer to the question, Awhat happens?@ would be to destroy the art of this novel. To say that is takes place roughly in the late 1940s and early 1950s is to typify it by chronologyBan act the text itself cannot support. To say that it deals with the problems indigenous people face when they encounter the white world is to blank the faces of otherwise richly developed, intensely unique characters who animate the green house. To say that it addresses the chasm between men=s lives and women=s lives, is to generalize and dilute the very real tragedies this book chronicles. To claim that this text defines the struggle between the modernity of urbanization and traditional culture is also to reduce the magical landscapes of both city and jungle Vargas Llosa presents.

The Green House, La Casa Verde, was first published in Spain in 1965. Vargas Llosa, like so many of his Latin American literary contemporaries, earned a doctorate degree from the University of Madrid. Still, Vargas Llosa=s work is rooted firmly in his native Peru, where over half of the population is of indigenous origin. The Green House was awarded the prestigious Romulo Gallegos Award in 1965. Literary merit earned Vargas Llosa this acclaim, but his name has been most recently heard in the political forum. In 1990 he lost his bid for the presidency of Peru in a run-off election with current leader Alberto Fujimori. The Green House shows Vargas Llosa=s astute sense of the challengesBboth political and otherwiseBpeculiar to Peru=s diverse population.

In September of 1993, Vargas Llosa addressed these issues more overtly in a speech titled, AThe Children of Columbus: From Violent Conquest to Common Culture.@ (http://www.reasonmag.com/9501/fe.VARGAS.text.html) Here Vargas Llosa speaks directly about the varied histories of his native Peru. He does this as only a storyteller can, and in the process, reveals much about his own approach to the writing of fiction. He explains that the Spanish Inquisitors first banned the novel in Latin America because they Aconsidered this literary genre as dangerous for the spiritual fate of the Indians as for the moral and political behavior of society@ (1). Vargas Llosa acknowledges that the Inquisitors were correct in this assumption, that fiction has an Ainevitably subversive nature@ (1).

He goes onto explain, however, that the Inquisitors Adid not realize that the realm of fiction was larger and deeper than that of the novel...In repressing and censoring the literary genre specifically invented to give >the necessity of lying= a place in the world, the Inquisitors achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted@ (1). Their achievement: Aa world into which fiction had spread and contaminated practically everything@ (Vargas Llosa 1). The Latin American world, Vargas Llosa says, struggles to separate what is real from fiction, hence their political struggles have been bloody and bitter (2).

But emerging from the blurred line Vargas Llosa describes is a rich literary tradition influenced by both his literal and figurative understanding of Amestizaje.@ There are no more Apure Indians@ (5), he says. Therefore, the mixing of indigenous and European cultures has been the main undercurrent of Peruvian, and he claims, Mexican culture. He explains

We speak in diminutives to dilute conviction. When we express ourselves, we take for granted that the best way to get from point A to point B is not a direct line but a curve, or better yet, a spiral. We believe we are being thoughtless or impolite when we do not color our statements with doubts, when we do not express ourselves with a measure of restraint. Whether we are Indian, white, black, mulatto, or mestizo, when we Peruvians or Mexicans speak, we are enacting the rituals, the scrupulous and indirect forms of interaction of the Incas, Aztecs, and other pre-Columbian cultures (6)   

It is this spiral that intrigues me as I reflect on  The Green House. Indeed, he has crafted this text with not a line in mind, but a gyre. In Vargas Llosa=s aestheticBif I may temporarily reduce it to that termBtelling his story about Apure Indians@ and their encounters with mestizaje Peru, demands this spiral mode, a swirling not unlike that of the Marañón river with its Asix violent miles of whirlpools, rocks, and torrents@ (The Green House 17).

It also requires the hidden narrator whose apparent absence makes this book a difficult, but compelling, adventure. Throughout the whole text, Vargas Llosa seems intent on making his characters speak for themselves, on making their dialogue Apresent@ in the same way his spiral current of narrative makes the past Apresent.@ He does this by giving the reader a flood of text, unmarked by paragraph indentations, quotation marks, or tags like Ahe said.@ Instead the clues as to who is speaking come more subtly, as shown in the following excerpt. Here, Lalita is in labor with her first child and  her husband=s friend, Aquilino, helps to deliver the baby, and also to distract Lalita from her pain:

They left and Don Aquilino went over to Lalita, he massaged her legs, so that the muscles would soften up, her belly, and the child would come out easily, you=ll see, and she laughing crying, she was going to tell Fushía that he was taking advantage of it to pet her, he was laughing, and oh my god, again, on her shoulder blades, oh my God, they must have been breaking apart, and Don Aquilino take a drink to calm yourself down, she took it, vomited, and sprayed it on Don Aquilino, who was rocking the hammock, easy, easy, Lalita, pretty girl, the pain was passing. Some red lights were dancing around the lamp, look, Lalita, the fireflies, the ayañahuis, when a person dies, hsi sould becomes a little moth, dids she know that?, and when they travel around at night, lighting up the jungle, the rivers, the inlets, when he died, Lalita,  she would always have an ayañahui next to her, and he would be her lamp. And she I=m afraid, Don Aquilino, don=t talk about death, and he don=t be afraid, he was rocking the hammock, it was to distract her, with a damp rag he was mopping her forehead, nothing=s going to happen to you, he=ll be born before sunup, when I touch you I can see that it=s going to be a boy. (243)

Certainly, the maze of speaking and action is difficult to follow. But the closeness of the speaker to what is spoken makes for a pace perfect for the moment. In this way, the green house is a brilliant example of form and content harmonizing. Still, in the beginning, that harmony may be hard to detect. The meandering corridors and false windows of the green house may discourage some readers. But by the Aend@ of Vargas Llosa=s masterwork, the reader will see that the central metaphor of this book is not a oddly constructed house painted green, but the river itself, swirling beneath the dense canopy of verdant jungle.   

Vargas Llosa, Mario. AThe Children of Columbus.@ 2 December 1999.  http://www.reasonmag.com/9501/fe.VARGAS.text.html

C. The Green House. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper, 1968.