Storyteller [Paperback]

The Storyteller is a good story when it is given to you as a synopsis. His story about two friends, one moves on with his life and the other stays behind and becomes a tribal storyteller in South America. Llosa is very good at telling a complex story and keeping the plot mysterious. The translation by Helen Lane can be a little too complex in sentence structure. For example, "Over the last two months, everything has gradually been closing: the shops, the laundries, the uncomfortable Bilioteca Nazionale alongside the river, the movie theaters that were my refuge at night, and, finally, the cafes where I went to read Dante and Machiavelli and think about Mascarita and the Machiguengas of the headwaters of the Alto Urubamba and the Madre de Dios". I do not know if I am just another dumb American who is aiding the butchery of old style writing, but I found this writing unnecessarily confusing and wordy. As the narrative continues, it seems like every once in a while the narrator wanders off into a rant of self explanation or description. In the last chapter of the book, the narrator goes on and on about Florence, Italy and its hate of tourists. He even goes off for a whole page (pp. 225-6) on the mosquitoes in Florence that attempt to attack the foreign devils, and he wanders off to a metaphor for ancient Florence and the Amazon. Llosa is writing about anthropology and culture, but his style of writing is like reading the way Dennis Miller talks.
I have a hard line following the stories of Mascarita and the mythical world of the Machiguengas. The contents are obtuse and make little sense to me. Tasurinchi's story includes spousal betrayal, sufferings from a cannibalistic tribe the insertion of a burning bamboo shoot up his rectum. Why? If this story wasn't filled with ranting and an overly ornate vocabulary it might have been a good story. If you can wade your way through the problems of the story structure, you can find an entire culture in the pages and the controversy over whether to westernize the tribe or to protect their way of life. My problem is my abject unwillingness to commit to a story with these faults. I once heard that you should give an author forty-five minutes of your time and if he doesn't grab you, then hope that the author will grab an audience with someone else. It's not like I have a grudge against the author, he just didn't do much for me in return for the four hours I gave him.