Vargas Llosa, Mario

New York. 1989. November 1989. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374270856. Translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 247 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Mark Sturgeon. Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat. keywords: Literature Translated Peru Latin America. FROM THE PUBLISHER - In a small gallery in Florence, a world-weary Peruvian happens upon an exhibition of photographs from the Amazon jungle. One of these pictures shows a tribal storyteller seated in the middle of a circle of Machiguenga Indians. The Machiguengas, until a few years before, had been completely isolated from civilization, so it is astonishing that these photographs exist at all. Even more curious is the fact that there is something particularly odd about the physical appearance of the storyteller. The man in the photo is horribly disfigured and seems far too light-skinned to be an Indian. As the visitor to the gallery stares at the photograph, he is overcome by the eerie sense that he knows this man. The resemblance to his old friend Saul Zuratas is uncanny. Zuratas, known to all as Mascarita-Mask Face-because of a terrible scar, has not been seen in years and is thought to have disappeared in Israel. Could it be, the Peruvian narrator begins to wonder, that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but the long-lost Mascarita? So begins Mario Vargas Llosa's magisterial new novel, THE STORYTELLER. The book follows the destiny of the Peruvian Jew Saul Zuratas-an outsider by ethnicity and by appearance-and imagines his transformation from a conscience-stricken modern man obsessed with the survival of the pre-modern peoples of the Amazon into a member of the Machiguenga tribe; indeed, their chronicler, their voice. Part Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin, part a character out of Kafka, Saul is one of the most moving and extraordinary people Vargas Llosa has ever created, an incarnation of conscience in a consciousless time. inventory #13024 ISBN: 0374270856.