Harsh Times

Harsh Times is Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2019 novel, a return to the political historical fiction that has occupied much of his late career. The book is set in Guatemala in the early 1950s and centers on the events leading up to the 1954 coup that overthrew the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz. The Arbenz government had implemented modest land reforms that affected the holdings of the United Fruit Company, the American banana producer, and in response the United Fruit Company and its allies in the United States government orchestrated a CIA backed coup that installed a military dictatorship and set off decades of civil war and political violence in the country.

Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, writes about Latin American political history with the kind of authority that comes from decades of close attention. Harsh Times brings together a wide cast of characters across multiple plot lines. American businessmen and propagandists. Guatemalan politicians caught between competing pressures. Dominican intelligence officers operating in the wake of the coup on behalf of the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo, whom Vargas Llosa had already written about in The Feast of the Goat. Ordinary Guatemalans whose lives are about to be changed forever by decisions made in distant boardrooms.

The novel is technically demanding in the way Vargas Llosa’s best work always is, with rapid scene shifts, overlapping dialogue, and a willingness to trust the reader to keep up. The cumulative effect is a portrait of how a small country gets crushed between corporate interests, Cold War politics, and the violence of dictatorship. The connections to The Feast of the Goat, with characters and themes from that earlier novel reappearing in new contexts, give Harsh Times an additional layer of meaning for readers familiar with Vargas Llosa’s wider catalogue.

For readers interested in Latin American history, in the long shadow of US intervention in the region, or in late twentieth century literary fiction, Harsh Times is a major late work from one of the most important novelists of his generation.