TEHRAN – Setara, the Iranian publisher of the Persian version of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Harsh Times”, plans to organize a review session of the novel.

The review session will be held on Thursday at 4 pm, the publisher has announced.

Translator Saeid Matin, editor Sayeh Eqtesadinia and literary critic Farzaneh Fathi will attend the session.   

“Harsh Times” is the true story of Guatemala’s political turmoil of the 1950s as only a master of fiction can tell it.

Guatemala, 1954: The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo Árbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that Árbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

In this thrilling novel, Vargas Llosa fuses reality with two fictions: that of the narrator, who freely re-creates characters and situations, and the one designed by those who would control the politics and the economy of a continent by manipulating its history.

“Harsh Times” is a gripping, revealing novel that directly confronts recent history. No one is better suited to tell this riveting story than Vargas Llosa, and there is no form better for it than his deeply textured fiction. Not since The Feast of the Goat, his classic novel of the downfall of Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic, has Vargas Llosa combined politics, characters and suspense so unforgettably.

Photo: A poster for a review session of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “Harsh Times”.

MMS/YAW