The Storyteller

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–2025) — a Peruvian writer, one of the outstanding representatives of Latin American prose, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, winner of the Cervantes Prize and other authoritative awards, a member of the Académie Française, and a Knight of the Légion d’honneur.

Each work by Vargas Llosa is a separate world—unforgettable, unique, and unlike anything else. The novel “The Storyteller,” equally distinctive in its own way, tells of a primitive nomadic tribe of Machiguenga Indians lost in the depths of the Amazonian selva.

If you are a Machiguenga, you must go. That is what Tasurinchì ordered. And if the Machiguenga ever stop, they will still have to leave—toward the place from where no one has ever returned. They have no possessions except what they can carry on their backs. And what for? After all, Tasurinchì gave them a virgin forest, velvety lagoons, and mirror-like rivers; he breathed into them legends and myths, and—most valuable of all—a collective memory embodied in the mysterious Storyteller.