America Reads Spanish

La ciudad y los perros

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa 
- Fiction
- Santillana USA Publishing Company 
- ISBN: 9788420412337
- Release Date: 2012-07-30

Synopsis

The Four angry cadets who have formed an inner circle in an attempt to ward off the boredom and stifling confinement of the military academy set off a chain of events that starts with a theft and leads to murder and suicide. La ciudad y los perros presents, with great accuracy and power, the cadets’ nightmare life: brutal initiation rites, poker in the latrines, drinking contests; and, above all else, the strange military code which, whether broken or followed, can only destroy.
Considered one of the best Spanish-language novels of the 20th century, in La ciudad y los perros a group of youngsters learn to survive amidst a ruthless and violent military discipline, deeply rooted racial prejudice and gaping socio-economic differences.

In 1962, La ciudad y los perros was awarded Seix Barral’s Premio Biblioteca Breve. That same year, upon winning the award, authorities at the Leoncio Prado Military School—which Vargas Llosa attended as a teenager and used as the setting for the novel—burned 1,000 copies in an official ceremony that took place in the patio of the school; and so began the literary adventures of Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel.

La ciudad y los perros no solamente es un ataque contra la crueldad ejercida a un grupo de jóvenes alumnos del Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado, sino también una crítica frontal al concepto erróneo de la virilidad, de sus funciones y de las consecuencias de una educación castrense malentendida. Aunada a la brutalidad propia de la vida militar, a lo largo de las páginas de esta extraordinaria novela, la vehemencia y la pasión de la juventud se desbocan hasta llegar a una furia, una rabia y un fanatismo que anulan toda sensibilidad.

Link to distributor