The Dream of the Celt
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
The Dream of the Celt explores the life of the Irish revolutionary Sir Roger Casement who was executed for treason after his involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising, travelling with its protagonist from Liverpool and Dublin to the Congo and Peru, where Casement worked as a British consul, and to London, where he ended his life in Pentonville jail.
With its preoccupation with political issues and its international scope The Dream of the Celt sits firmly in the tradition of the greatest of Vargas Llosa's work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Nobel Prize for Literature winner (in 2010) and one-time Peruvian presidential candidate, Vargas Llosa chronicles the life of Roger Casement, an Irish patriot and human rights activist, or "specialist in atrocities," who was executed by the British in 1916 after the Easter Rising, which heralded the beginning of Irish independence. This is a meticulously researched book about a deeply complex man; Vargas Llosa's admirable powers as a writer of fiction are apparent when he slows the pace of the narrative to allow access to Casement's thoughts as he languishes in prison, waiting to hear whether his stay of execution has been granted. Vargas Llosa (The Bad Girl) is at his best writing as a novelist rather than biographer, but the unnecessarily complex narrative structure in which Casement's life story unfolds at a galloping pace achieves neither the best of biography nor the best of fiction. Readers will wish that the book was either one or the other.
