Friday, April 21 [2000, note from the webmaster]. After 38 days of strike, the factors of Nice, having finally managed to "negotiate" with management, that is to say, to impose on it with all their requirements, return to work. But they find it intolerable that the Post hired for two weeks for some temporary help distribute less slowly some 2 million Nice objects that have not received. Thus the citizen-taxpayers will wait even longer their mail. Factors believe that it is for them alone to ensure their "public service mission"!
Grand revelation on the radio since the arrest of Dutroux, the pedophile murderer of little girls, Belgium, police, justice, the Belgian authorities are more vigilant, repression against pedophiles harder, so, sociologists say, we can speak of an era before and after Dutroux. Is it really necessary to use the vast knowledge of social scientists to make a statement which is accessible to any reader of the morning newspaper? Dressing scientific specialty of sociology.
Have I heard Ms. Lebranchu, Minister of I do not know what, expressing his "deep emotion" to death "shocking" the young woman killed in the attack in Dinan, adding that one can certainly go after a symbol (the "Mcdonald" symbol of globalization, U.S. imperialism) provided to save human lives? It is therefore legal, and legitimate Republican destroy a restaurant with explosives if there is no loss of life? It is urgent that Ms. Lebranchu asks his colleague, the Minister of Justice Gardeux, offer him a copy of the French Penal Code
The last time I saw Mario Vargas Llosa, 27 March, at a luncheon at Claude Imbert, he brought me a copy of his new novel, La Fiesta del Chivo , just out in Madrid. I won in Britain and today I completed the reading.
The story takes place in Santo Domingo, in part during the last years of the dictatorship of Trujillo, assassinated in 1961. The dictator is also one of the two main characters in the novel. The other is a woman of 49, who returns to his home island in 1996 after having lived thirty-five years in the United States. At first glance, according to the canons of contemporary criticism, nothing seems more antiquated than the historical novel. But, specifically, La Fiesta del Chivo is not a historical novel, a novel, some characters are also included also in the history books. But they are treated here as a character in a novel. Not that Mario taking [Note: this shell is included in the original edition, the author intends to keep the blog as well] liberties with historical truth. This would be fictionalized, which is quite different. Historic or not, the characters are for the novelist first human beings who share this quality with the imaginary characters they interact in the story. At the same time, nothing less "classic" that the very structure of this narrative, the juxtaposition and overlap of sequences that explain each other without the novelist says nothing of a didactic or ponderous. No need for explanation of this art is. Readers may have forgotten or never knew what was the Trujillo dictatorship - and this is certainly the case for 90% of them - and still be worn by a narrative power that owes nothing but itself. I want to give particular instance the story, spread out in small batches throughout the book, the night ambush by which a handful of plotters managed to get freedom Trujillo.
And yet, the novel conveys a political lesson, never theorized, only shown: what a cruel dictatorship, complete, exerted on a small nation of barely 3 million people, a dictatorship where the bully can bully almost each of its individual subjects. A pure dictatorship, without ideology, except for show. The absolute power of one man, a tyrant serving only himself, as portrayed in Xenophon From the tyranny . With the same art, within the only romantic vein, Mario had succeeded in its history Mayta to intuitively make us live within what the terrorist phenomenon. How and why does one become a terrorist, even and especially in a democracy? This deployment narrative and psychological level of human beings who are the actors or the toys makes us understand the origins and nature of political phenomena much more deeply than many political analysis. The characteristic of literary art in this case is to transform really dramatic self a political phenomenon who once fascinates even the imagination of an audience, a priori, did not care altogether.
strictly historical terms, however, reading the Fiesta del Chivo reminded me of a fact that I had forgotten. Is that the U.S. has inflicted and were imposed by Latin America, in the framework of the OAS (Organization of American States), economic sanctions that eventually kneel the Trujillo dictatorship, before same as it was not shot down. Yet he was a dictator right and even far-right, if ever there was. The sanctions that were struck much harder than the embargo that the U.S. (and only them) should apply before Castro. So it is true that Washington has sought to "destabilize" the communistic regimes and tyrants never right.
Jean-Francois Revel, in Dishes of Season
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