The Green House

Blurb

The Green House is the second novel by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, published in 1966. The novel is set over a period of forty years in two regions of Peru: Piura, a dusty town near the coast in the north, and Peruvian Amazonia, specifically the jungle region near the Marañón river.
The story is broken into four parts, each of which begins with an impressionistic narrative without paragraph breaks. Each part is then broken into chapters. Each chapter is further divided into five separate narratives: 1 Bonifacia in the jungle region, 2 Fushia and Aquilino on the Marañón, 3 Anselmo in Piura, 4 various characters involved in power struggles in the jungle, and 5 Lituma and Bonifacia in Piura. The novel concludes with a four-chapter epilogue.
Vargas Llosa adds to this narrative complexity by referring to characters obliquely and by telling the story non-chronologically. He also creates double narratives within chapters without clear demarcation. The effect is to interweave past and present and to suggest an omnipresent and continuing corruption and brutality.