Conversación en La Catedral

Escrito por Mario Vargas Llosa

Narrado por Johan Gamarra

Conversación en La Catedral es algo más que un hito en el derrotero literario del Premio Nobel de Literatura Mario Vargas Llosa: es un punto de referencia insoslayable, un dato fijo en la historia de la literatura actual.

Zavalita y el zambo Ambrosio conversan en La Catedral. Estamos en Perú, durante el «ochenio» dictatorial del general Manuel A. Odría. Unas cuantas cervezas y un río de palabras en libertad para responder a la palabra amordazada por la dictadura.

Conversación en La Catedral (1969) no es, sin embargo, una novela histórica. Sus personajes, las historias que éstos cuentan, los fragmentos que van encajando, conforman la descripción minuciosa de un envilecimiento colectivo, el repaso de todos los caminos que hacen desembocar a un pueblo entero en la frustración.

Conversación en La Catedral es una cruda radiografía del envilecimiento y la frustración de la sociedad peruana bajo la presión de un poder dictatorial.

«Si tuviera que salvar del fuego una sola de las [novelas] que he escrito, salvaría ésta.»
Mario Vargas Llosa

Reseña:
«Absolutamente vital en estos días de encierro y reflexión.»
Boris Izaguirre, ABC ("30 libros para una cuarentena")

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Penguin Random House Audio
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 8 oct 2020
• ISBN: 9788420437736

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, 1936 - Lima, 2025). Premio Nobel de Literatura, su carrera literaria se inició con el estreno de un drama en Piura y el libro de relatos Los jefes, pero alcanzó notoriedad con sus novelas La ciudad y los perros (1962; Premio Biblioteca Breve y Premio de la Crítica) y La casa verde (1966; Premio de la Crítica y Rómulo Gallegos). Escribió piezas teatrales —La señorita de Tacna, Kathie y el hipopótamo, La Chunga, El loco de los balcones, Ojos bonitos, cuadros feos, Las mil noches y una noche y Los cuentos de la peste—, estudios y ensayos —García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanc, La orgía perpetua, La utopía arcaica, La verdad de las mentiras, La tentación de lo imposible, El viaje a la ficción,La civilización del espectáculo, La llamada de la tribu y La mirada quieta (de Pérez Galdós)—, memorias —El pez en el agua—, relatos —Los cachorros—, obra periodística —El fuego de la imaginación, El país de las mil caras y El reverso de la utopía—, Conversación en Princeton, con Rubén Gallo, Medio siglo con Borges, Dos soledades, Un bárbaro en París: Textos sobre la cultura francesa, y, sobre todo, novelas: Conversación en La Catedral, Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La tía Julia y el escribidor, La guerra del fin del mundo, Historia de Mayta, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, El hablador, Elogio de la madrastra, Lituma en los Andes, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, La Fiesta del Chivo, El Paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, El sueño del celta, El héroe discreto, Cinco Esquinas, Tiempos recios y Le dedico mi silencio. Además de los mencionados, recibió los premios Cervantes, Príncipe de Asturias, PEN/Nabokov y Grinzane Cavour. Fue miembro de la Real Academia Española y de la Académie Française.

Comentarios para Conversación en La Catedral

[jwhenderson_1 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

A complicated historical novel that speaks to the importance of personal freedom.

[charlie68_1 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

Not for everyone. The narration goes back and forth in the story and some of the story lines interrupt each other. It makes sense in the end if you have the patience to get that far. Very well written the translator did a great job.

[thewasp_1 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

Sandiago Zavalita, son of a wealthy businessman, meets Ambrosio, his father's old chauffer, when he goes to collect his dog from the pound. Over many beers at "the Catedral" they relate their lives over the intervening years. Set in Peru with a backdrop of political turmoil and corruption.
This is a difficult book to read and will require your full attention. Persevere for the first 200 pages with the multiple simultaneous conversations, the different names for the same people, and the lack of punctuation and as you begin to understand the author's flow you will be rewarded by with masterful story

[meditationesmartini · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

This is a story about one man's movement from favoured son to prodigal to black sheep, set against the double background of thrillerish political machinations in the Odría dictatorship in Spain in the 1950s and a social-realist supporting cast, like Les Miserables if there was no loving God and everyone was depressed. It could have been a much better book than it was: Vargas Llosa can occasionally write, and islands of dreamy clarity (?) (!) emerge from a greasy dishwater-brown sea of lazy self-indulgence, soggy sense-description, irritating verbal tics, and piss-poor piss-stream of consciousness, seeming less like he was trying to capture the way thought processes work than that he just couldn't be bothered filling in the missing words or thinking about how his sentences were structured. And sometimes neither do I, but they never gave me a Nobel Prize for it.

[funkendub · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

Manuel Odría ruled Peru from 1948 until 1956. His dictatorship was deeply corrupt. His Minister of Internal Affairs, for instance, ran a brothel. That the cabron in charge of internal affairs should run a prostitution ring is, like a death-row guard named Mort, almost unbearably ironic. In this case, it’s true. Politicians and industrialists performed perverse acts and whispered state secrets to the prostitutes, giving the Minster, and Odría, leverage on all sorts of situations and people.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s sweeping novel is a history of Peru and Latin American dictatorships told in a Joycean late-1960s conversation in a bar known as The Cathedral. Santiago is the son of an influential politician who, like so many idealistic young people in the ’60s, has rejected his father’s corrupt if pragmatic world. Santiago is a minor editorial-page journalist. One afternoon, at the insistence of his wife, he goes in search of the family dog. Dogs were being picked up as strays, even if they weren’t, because the dogcatchers got paid per animal. At the pound Santiago runs into his father’s now-aging chauffeur, Ambrosio.

Santiago and Ambrosio strike up a conversation at The Cathedral. The subject of their long conversation is the 16-year dictatorship of Odría, as Santiago is after the truth about his father’s involvement in a notorious murder if that era. If, in Ulysses, James Joyce managed to give a political history of Ireland in a single 1904 day’s perambulations, Llosa managed a political history of an entire continent in an afternoon’s conversation. Where Joyce’s masterpiece is full of modernist tricks and the rejection of naturalism, Llosa’s is less flashy, and he is, arguably, the better novelist. He manages to include a vast panoply of characters remembered, either directly or through various media, by Santiago and Ambrosio. The effect is truly cathedral-like, echoing and resonating with the voices of the dead, the broken and the until-now forgotten.

Conversation in the Cathedral was originally published in 1969, when Llosa was 33, and translated into English in 1975. Llosa called it an attempt at a “total novel”: the complete fictionalization of an entire society. Llosa may be, and indeed has been, criticized for his political beliefs (he was a staunch supporter of neoliberlism and admired Margaret Thatcher, for instance; this may well be why he hasn’t won the Nobel, despite being short-listed any number of times), but there is no doubt that he has long been one of the great craftsmen of the long-fiction form. In Conversation, he never drops a stitch, building and maintaining suspense on a monumental scale.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book]

[snash_44 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

This is a book about corruption on both the public and private level throughout society. The ambience of that depravity is created by presenting an entwined story from many points of view jumping frequently from one point of view to another and from one time to another. It sometimes makes following the story difficult but it's part of what envelops and swallows the reader up in malaise

[deebee1_1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

One afternoon in the late 1960s somewhere in the streets of Lima, Santiago, goes out in search of the family dog. At the pound, he meets the aging Ambrosio, his father's former chauffeur, whom he has not seen for 15 years. Later, in a lengthy conversation over beers, Santiago and Ambrosio talk of their lives under the Odria dictatorship two decades earlier.

Santiago is a journalist in a small paper, the son of an influential politician, an idealist who has rejected his social position by embracing an alternative way of life. When Santiago cut his ties with family years ago, many questions were left unanswered, some of them he didn't dare even seek answers to. He tried to eke out a living, found a wife, and fought to get the next story out. This was his life now. The meeting with Ambrosio turns into an intense examination of those years when decisions and acts of people very close to them, and by their own response, would scar and torment them slowly over time. Secrets, a complex web of intrigues, scandals and crimes, repression, were necessary to maintain a "stable" society. Even then, there was an imminent sense of degradation and frustration. Not just a historical narrative, the novel is as much a political and social critique.

The complexity of their stories which detail the corruption and perversions of the few individuals who kept the machinery of the dictatorship oiled and running, is further emphasized by Vargas Llosa's narrative style. Most of this immense book (600+ pages) is composed of snatches of several events or dialogues, happening in different timeframes, interlaced at the level of the sentence. They are stories within the big story, and dialogues within the big dialogue.

Though at times I felt it dragging, overall, the novel is brilliant and Vargas Llosa here is most impressive. Compared with several of his other books which I've read, this is easily his best. And definitely one of the best novels that have come out of Latin America. Highly recommended, of course.

[kidzdoc_1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Santiago Zavala is the 30 year old son of a powerful Peruvian senator, who is estranged from his upper middle class family and eking out a meager existence as a investigational journalist in Lima. One day during an afternoon siesta his wife tells him that two black men snatched her beloved dog out of her arms, and he goes to the nearest pound to look for the animal. He finds the dog, and one of the men who took it is also there. Santiago quickly recognizes this man as his father's former chauffeur Ambrosio, who has obviously fallen on hard times. Ambrosio takes him to a local dive, La Catedral, where they reminisce about their former lives over the remainder of the afternoon.


The conversation is interspersed with other conversations that take place a few years before, during the dictatorial presidency of Manuel Odría (1948-56). Ambrosio was also formerly employed by the despicable and cunning Don Cayo Bermúdez, who was Odría's Director of Security and Minister for Public Order and the enemy of the senator. Santiago had previously learned that Ambrosio had been accused of the brutal murder of Bermúdez's mistress while he worked for Senatory Zavala, but Ambrosio reveals much more unsavory information about himself, the senator and Bermúdez, and the extent of the depravity of the Odría regime.


Llosa gives us an unsettling and unforgettable view of the effect of dictatorship and corruption on individuals of all levels of Peruvian society during and after Odría. All are adversely affected, even Bermúdez, who profits more than anyone from the regime.


This book was not an easy read, particularly in its first half, as the different conversations are woven together at times, which requires close attention and occasional review of previous pages or chapters. I'd encourage anyone who reads this book to be aware of this in advance, as lriley did in his review, and to stick with it, as most of the latter half in the book does not use this technique, making for a faster read.

[myhi_1 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

First MVL's novel I read.
Great story of a young generation - a guy who's meant to make things move and keep them moving, in spite of a family who's ever wanted a different kinda future for him. Miraflores - Lima, wealthy people, the revolution.
Very daring novel... tough and cruel. A fair introduction to the following MVL's novels I read.

[john_44 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Conversation in the Cathedral is a terrific book. Lest anyone be put off with the prospect of a lengthy religious conversation in a place of worship, the "Cathedral" is La Catedral, a rundown, dingy bar where Santiago has a long talk with Ambrosio, a black man who once worked as a chauffeur for Santiago's father. Through the book we learn of Santiago's turbulent relations with his family (mother, father, brother and sister) and of Ambrosio's own very different life. When they meet in La Catedral, Santiago is married and has been working for some years as a reporter for a tabloid newspaper (having much earlier given up university much to the chagrin of his father) and Ambrosio is down on his luck, working in a stinking dog pound where unwanted animals are trussed up in sacks and beaten to death. Elements of the conversation are interspersed throughout the book as various events are recounted.

The book is a story about the rise and fall, the twists and turns of political and social power, about pervasive and specific corruption, about personal freedom and the violence of politics and life in Peru in the 1950s during the dictatorship of Manuel Odria, about the corruption of lives that collapse once the ephemera of money and power and influence disappear, about a search for identity and the entanglements of personal and family relations and pressures, about love found quietly and unostentatiously, about respect and honour even within a maelstrom of conflicting passions, about how different people deal with society and the pressures it brings to bear, and about how no matter how much you think you know a person, you can never know everything and there may be dark and seemingly inexplicable sides.

Not only does the book have a large canvas of characters and actions, Llosa's style of writing is unique and quite wonderful. Whole chapters of conversations and descriptions switch back and forth changing characters, time, place and perspective. At first I found it disconcerting, not helped when the same character can be called different names (e.g. a nickname, the family name, the first name), but once you catch the rhythm, the effect is terrific. There is no linear progression, or very little of it. Llosa collapses space and time and creates a sense of the simultaneity of life whereby different people are discussing, or acting upon, or considering the same event or action but from very different perspectives, or you see the results of an action or event before you understand the causes, again often through varying perspectives. This greatly enriches an already wonderful story.

I would highly recommend this book.

[lriley_43 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Set during the time of the Odria dictatorship in Peru this novel examines the gap between the poor and the powerful probably as well as anything that I have ever read. Santiago the son of an extremely wealthy industrialist rejects that life by first joining a communist party cell and after it is squashed becoming a newspaperman over the strident objections of his family especially his doting father (Don Fermin) who plans for him to one day take over his business interests. Ambrosio--the second major voice in this conversation that takes place in a bar called the Cathedral had been connected to Santiago's youth as his fathers black chauffeur and also reluctantly on occasion as his father's lover who when depressed has a taste for masochistic sex. Ambrosio is in the meantime really in love with one of the households maids and more or less all his plans unravel over time as the maid is fired and he becomes involved in various demonstrations against the government leaving the family himself eventually and winding up poverty stricken. Behind all this are the policies and politics of the dictatorship a lot of which we see through the eyes of another character an important government minister Don Cayo and also through his mistress a former nightclub singer Malvina. As for the novel itself this is not a short work but it moves along very nicely--the reader might want to take note of personalities though as there are many and some are sometimes called by nicknames. Vargas Llosa is an excellent writer and this may be his best work.