A review by blueyorkie
A Guerra do Fim do Mundo by Mario Vargas Llosa

4.0

It is around Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel, a historical and Christic figure, ascetic and hallucinated. A madman doubled as a saint, nicknamed the Counselor by his disciples, that one day, a millenarian and messianic movement formed in Bahia. At the end of the XIXth century, when Brazil had just abolished slavery and was still in the infancy of a democracy, it passed from the Empire to the Republic for less than ten years. This court of miracles, this motley collection of poor natives, beggars, pilgrims, impoverished peasants, Maroon enslaved people, freedmen, bandits, and repentant murderers, refused to bow to the new power. It rejected the census, civil marriage, the decimal metric system, paying taxes, banishing private property and money in absolute collectivism, restoring churches, cemeteries, and holy places, and seeing in the Republic the embodiment of the Antichrist. This "city of god" successfully routed three military expeditions to give way to the number finally. The War of the End of the World, a moving and harsh historical fresco, seeks to bring this special moment back to life with its epic breath and the great wealth of these well-established characters. By freeing himself from the limits of time and space, Mario Vargas Llosa meticulously retraces the circumstances and motivations that led all these destitute and disgraced beings to wander through Sertao, a particularly inhospitable region of the Brazilian Northeast. To share without back the fate of this illuminated man, whom he sees as a prophet, he describes the organization and the preparations of the belligerents of the two camps. The maneuvers of the Republicans' exploit, the sovereignty of monarchical inspiration, and the press organs in the pay of their sponsors blame themselves for the proliferation of this seditious Sebastianist movement.
This is an excellent novel about a guerrilla war, a form of civil war with which the history of Latin America abounds. It is a particularly poignant book from which we do not come out unscathed.