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"The City and the Dog" Author: [Peru] Mario Vargas Llosa Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House
"The City and the Dog" Author: [Peru] Mario Vargas Llosa Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House
Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
The story begins with a group of cadets planning to steal chemistry test papers and sell them. The theft is discovered by the school authorities, who order the thieves to turn themselves in or the whole class will be punished. Someone reports the thieves, and the "boss" of the theft gang vows to find the informer. Not long after, during a live-fire exercise, a cadet nicknamed "Slave" is shot dead...
"The City and the Dogs" was written by Vargas Llosa based on his personal experience of studying in a military academy as a teenager. It is set in the Leoncio Prado Military School in Lima, the capital of Peru, and the bustling city of Lima. It revolves around several military academy cadets and depicts the cruel lives of the cadets and their various conflicts with the school authorities.
This is Vargas Llosa's first novel published when he was 27 years old. In 1962, before the novel was published, it won the Spanish Concise Book Award. After it was published in 1963, it won the Spanish Critics Award, making Vargas Llosa famous overnight. The novel was banned in the author's home country of Peru shortly after it was published. The military government at the time burned 1,500 Peruvian copies of The City and the Dogs at the author's alma mater, the Leoncio Prado Military School.
The City and the Dogs is considered by some critics to be one of the four landmark novels marking the beginning of the Latin American literary explosion (the other three are The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez). In 2001, the book was selected as one of the "100 Best Spanish-language Novels of the 20th Century" by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
About the Author · · · · · ·
Mario Vargas Llosa
A famous writer and world master of novels, he is known as the "master of structural realism". He has won many important literary awards around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature: Hemingway Prize in 1985, Prince of Spain's Aliturrias Prize in Literature in 1986, Gold Medal of the Americas in 1988, the highest honor in Spanish literature - the Cervantes Prize in Literature in 1994, the Jerusalem Prize in Literature in Israel in 1999, the Menendez Pelayo International Prize in 2000, was elected President of the International PEN in 1976, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.