Traum there are Celts 
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Item service Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel
Europe was the cradle of evil
Mario Vargas Llosa is in Madrid's new novel "The Dream of the Celts before. It is about the crimes of the European colonial period. And it appears, surprisingly, not in Germany by Suhrkamp, but at Rowohlt. By Paul
Ingendaay, Madrid
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TeilenTwitter04. Since November 2010 he stands on the podium of the Madrid Cultural Center Casa de América and can celebrate, but remains modest, and who did not believe it, only the well-considered sentences should in its soft Peruvian English listening: Mario Vargas Llosa has experienced seventy-four years, the highest honor the literary world, but the Nobel Prize is for one who follows such a strict work-rate as a worse time wasters.
"I try to keep my writing routine," he says, "but it is not easy. People besiege my house. I sleep two or three hours a night when I sleep at all. "He had never thought to receive this award, but only wanted to" write good books. "
1 Book launch in Madrid
His latest novel, he has brought, "El sueño del celta" (The Dream of the Celts, Alfaguara publishing house). The book is now available in all countries of the English-speaking world, is already in Madrid organized a marathon reading, it is the sure-seller. The presenter expressed the thanks again from Latin America for granting ceremony in Sweden, then she says, the translation rights of the novel had been sold in twenty-two countries, including Germany. Later, we ask for, who the lucky publisher and the host shows us the sheet with the list that comes fresh from the agency Carmen Balcells in Barcelona: Rowohlt stands out.
This leaves Vargas Llosa after about three decades, the Suhrkamp publishing house and returns to the house, which published his early songs in German: "The City and the Dogs," "The Green House" and "The eternal orgy," his essay about Flaubert. But the lush garden of the modern Latin American literature, Siegfried Unseld was created by Suhrkamp Verlag, is poorer by a mighty tree.
The secret lies in the grave, "The dream of the Celts" describes in 450 pages the life of Roger Casement (1864 to 1916), an Irishman Catholic-Protestant origin, who acquired two very different kinds of fame. Once, because, as British consul relentless reports of the atrocities of the Belgian colonial power in Congo (1904) and the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Amazon Basin (1912) wrote, for which he was praised, ennobled passed around, and feared, with good reason. And partly because he campaigned as an Irish nationalist in Germany against Britain's rule over Ireland, for which he was immediately thrown in front of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 in London and hanged in prison three months later. Vargas Llosa's novel ends with the moment when you put the condemned the noose around the neck and perfectly formed British hangman whispered to him: "If you hold your breath, It goes faster, sir. "
An important role for loss of reputation Casement played the so-called" Black Diaries ", in which the diplomat had created a chronicle of his homosexual activities. The authenticity of the diaries was often called into question, but now you tend to regard them as authentic. Homosexuality was punishable in England, along with the stigma of treason it was enough to the famous, highly respected man shortly before depriving any support. For Vargas Llosa these records are rather the product of an overheated imagination, and the homosexuality of the main character in the novel is rather drawn with delicate lines. Not an issue for big revelations. The secret rests with its carrier in the grave.
The employment of the Peruvian-English author with Roger Casement goes back several years. In an essay on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (2001) report on the meeting between the two men mentioned in the Congo and Conrad's admiration for Casement's confident opinion on the Belgian colonial policy. The disenchantment was the one to the other in advance, as Conrad got out of his three-year contract as captain of the merchant navy and returned after six months returned to England. Both men laid, each in its own way, depressing testimony of the alleged beneficial Effect of European civilization, religion and trade culture in Africa from - Conrad through his ambiguous narrative, Casement in his report on torture, murder and exploitation, it is one of the Belgian King Leopold II (Vargas Llosa him next to Hitler and Stalin to the great political criminals of the century made it possible) to become one of the richest men of the earth.
Some dialogue has unwittingly naive
It had employed him as slightly educated, religious men had become barbarians, Vargas Llosa told now in Madrid. In an area that covers 75 percent of the area of Europe, by greed and profit seeking any legality had disappeared. "The dream of the Celts" can be read in this respect as a popular non-fiction. Belgian military - the Force Publique - pressed the Congolese population not only in unpaid labor service from sunrise to sunset, they shot at each village and a quota of food, which you could arrange for the occupation. Since the rates were far above the operating capacity, were whipping and the amputation of hands, feet and genitals of everyday life. Men sold their children, and women were locked up in brothels until the debts were paid, and the terrorized villages lost in the reign of terror of the colonial power by half, sometimes three quarters of its population.
Roger Casement's revelations at the time had an enormous public impact and offset the diplomats of various countries in excitement. Many of the exploiting companies were listed on the stock exchange in London. In 1905 Mark Twain wrote a satirical monologue mocking King Leopold II and illustrated it with photographs of Congolese with chopped-off hands. Today's civil wars, corruption and abuse of power, Vargas Llosa, were the direct result of the then European politics.
In the wake of this political essays head Enlightenment and modern one encounters again and again to the call, literature may be somewhat socially be profitable, they should be the droning and the entertainment business as well as the political refuse anesthesia. Naturally, then, that Vargas Llosa was captivated by his subject, in libraries on three continents, researched and talked to many experts. In Congo the way, he only hit on only one, the name of Roger Casement was a term. It seems that this loss of memory of the history of the novelist with his real task is provided: the story of the knowledge of evil to spread in all the details and provide them with dates, names and locations. At this weight, the novel "The Dream of the Celts" hard to bear, and some fictional dialogue acts involuntarily naive.
As Mario Vargas Llosa laughs
In "The Rings of Saturn" in 2001, too early deceased writer WG Sebald has shown how it would go differently. Chapter five of this amazing book is to thirty-five pages of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement. The author, he tells us, is in the green Samtfauteuil asleep in front of a television documentary about the Congo-two passengers, a few sentences but have him pursued by eerie precision even in his dreams. Then, after waking up, Sebald wants to know more. After he reads. But he does not tell us what he has read. From his research, he tells us nothing. He only told He swears he floats with half-closed eyes to the things and draws from these two tragic heroes of the battle-weary disenchantment of a poetry that you could get perhaps only if one was called Sebald.
One last question from the Madrid crowd. Some writers say, a Swedish journalist, after the granting of the Nobel Prize were relaxed and had stopped. Whether it was fear in him, too? As Mario Vargas Llosa laughs like a good joke. No, he's always working, his life was writing, many would find it boring, he does not. "Death," he says, "I will meet with a pen in his hand."
© REUTERS
Text: FAZ
Pictures: DAPD, REUTERS
He strikes again! As mentioned elsewhere already, some of our guys have managed to hole 8 several times to sink the ball with two strikes. 
