military school

In the early ’50s, Vargas Llosa’s father dispatched him to the Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado, a military school in Lima, because he thought it would “cure” the boy of his interest in literature.

“It was an extremely traumatic experience which in many ways marked the end of my childhood,” Vargas Llosa told the Paris Review decades later of his military school experience, “the rediscovery of my country as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition and caught up in sometimes ferocious battle.”

Stark and unsparing, it is told through shifting perspectives and in non-linear fashion, depicting a brutal world of hazing, murder and abuse of power at a military school that serves as a microcosm of an embattled Peru.

Outside of military school, the Poet grapples with a family life that has been ruptured by the ways of a despotic father; within it, he survives the academy’s violent cliques by entertaining his fellow cadets with pornographic novelitas.

Military school followed, as well as a precocious writing career.