The Green House Book

Another masterpiece from Vargas Llosa. His second book is a non-linear narrative that takes place in the Amazon with events and people around the notorious Green House, a bordel in a small hammock in the jungle created by Don Anselmo (also harmonica player) amd painted, well, green. Trafficking and abuse of women abounds alongside the exploitation of Indian tribes along the Santiago and Nieves Rivers by soldiers, bootleggers, and smugglers. Nearly everyone is corrupt including the nuns who welcome girls kidnapped from Indian tribes, taught Spanish and housekeeping and then sent one way or another as "inmates" of the Green House. The narration drifts from one perspective to another with the time freely moving as well back and forth over the lives of the protagonists - and like Conversation in the Cathedral which followed this book, sometimes the timeline even changes between sentences. Some critics have found this Vargas Llosa's most difficult book, but I found it easier to follow than Conversation.
The one downside is that once again, as in The Time
of the Hero and The War at the End of the World, all of the female characters are prostitutes or religious nuns and are not given quite the depth of the male characters with the possible exception of Bonifacia. But then, I believe she was Wildflower too so a prostitute. Perhaps it is just particularly sad that the sexploitation here of enslaving Indian girls is more shocking that in War at the End of the World because this book is taking place in the 1950s rather than the 1890s. I suppose that if the way Amazonian Indians by Peruvians (and Brasilians) is accurate to even a small degree, it is hardly surprising that a populist, left-leaning terrorist movement in the name of native rights such as the Sentero Luminoso could become such a threat to Peru 30 years later.

In A Fish in the Water, MVL's autobiography, he explains that The Green House in Piura was a real place that he frequented as an impressionable young man, but far later than the action in this wonderful book.