Mario Vargas Llosa
Il sogno del Celta

What is a hero? In Greek mythology or fairy tales, it is an unblemished being who fights against evil, and almost always emerges victorious. In reality, we all know that things are different. Roger Casement, the protagonist of this novel-biography by Mario Vargas Llosa, is a hero in every sense. But alas, he is profoundly human, I would say deeply contaminated by the earthly world. His legendary life (as written on the back of the book) is wonderfully engrossingly narrated by the author and what emerges is the portrait of a wonderful man who, like all human beings, carries his own contradictions, particularly tied to his inability to live his sexual condition freely.

In my opinion, the book is extraordinary precisely because of its profound humanity: its ability to delve into the soul of man and bring forth an heroism utterly devoid of asceticism or religiosity. A heroism made of "flesh and bones." No hagiography but the apotheosis of a righteous man, of his fears and weaknesses. A rightful tribute to this man who, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lived his terrible experience as a consul in the service of Great Britain first in the Congo, where he witnessed the atrocities of the Belgian colonialism of Leopold II, linked to rubber extraction, and then in Putumayo, in the Amazon, where his reportage ("The blue book") contributed to the collapse of Julio C. Arana's empire, a rubber magnate in the Amazon forests, and a character who in Llosa's book embodies the essence of the evil of the time. Even in this latter case, a horrendous picture of exploitation and mistreatment of the natives emerges. Casement's last act, the one dearest to him, the liberation of his Ireland from the yoke of that England to which he had loyally served for several years (another element of contradiction), represents his only defeat on the battlefield, given that his actions, infused with a nationalism at times very intense, will be defeated at least in the field and will lead him to the gallows. However, even in this case, his departure is like that of the Irish patriots who sacrificed themselves in the "Easter week" of 1916, the glorification of that ideal of freedom and call to Gaelic values that will help ignite the fire in the heart of an Ireland that was already smoldering.

I recommend this book to anyone who has blood in their veins.