“Si tuviera que salvar del fuego una sola de las novelas que he escrito, salvaría esta.”
(“If I had to save from the fire just one of the novels I have written, I would save this one.”) — Mario Vargas Llosa referring to Conversación en La Catedral.
In his novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa turns Thomas Hobbes on his head. Hobbes is known for his famous quote about life without a strong leader at the helm of government, that it is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Vargas Llosa shows us that life is the same or worse when a dictator is in control. His novel is a bleak portrayal of life in Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel Odría in the 1950s. In spite of great wealth and resources, we unfortunately see many similarities in America today. A would be dictator authoritarian leader has turned our democracy into a shambles. We might well ask the famous question Vargas Llosa’s main character Santiago asks in the first paragraph of the book:
¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú? (At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?)
What happens to intelligence, conscience, and idealism inside a corrupt society? What happens when fraud, blackmail, grift, and fear take over and simple decency falls to the wayside? Vargas Llosa provides us with a vision, an Ebenezer Scrooge moment. What we do with it will define who we are as a people and whether the dream that made America is intact or replaced by a nightmare.
In one way the 600 page novel is simple. Santiago, the son of a rich businessman, runs into his father’s former chauffeur by accident. They go to a bar, La Catedral (not a cathedral) for a drink and a book length conversation ensues. Santiago wants to know the sins of his dead father and how his father was complicit in the Odría dictatorship. Ambrosio, a lower-class man of mixed race, seeks to understand his own past and how his connection to Santiago’s corrupt father, Don Fermin, led him to participate in shady dealings, ultimately revealing the pervasive corruption and moral decay under the dictatorship. Ambrosio serves as a key witness to the nation’s unraveling through his complicity and survival story.
It is not an easy read as the conversation winds back and forth between different time periods and character viewpoints but it is fascinating to see the world of corrupt politicians and businessmen looking to enhance their wealth, strong men who abuse women and the poor, antigovernment activists working for change (Communists, socialists, and democrats), prostitutes, homosexuals and lesbians, maids and butlers and gardeners for the rich, bar, restaurant and brothel owners, organizers, university students, professors, terrorists and so forth as they navigate within and around the dictatorship. One can’t help but conjure up the old French proverb: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Understanding injustice does not automatically give you the courage to resist it. Santiago recognizes the hypocrisy of his father and class. He understands how the dictatorship works, the mock lies and power structures. But, he withdraws rather than confronts. Intelligence without action can become a sophisticated form of resignation. He wants clean hands in a dirty world, and that desire leaves him inert. This is reminiscent of Camus: ethical absolutism can excuse inaction. (It can also excuse morally repugnant action—Trump.)
Santiago is privileged. Ambrosio is not. Despair itself can be a class privilege, and a subtle form of complicity. Hatred of power does not free you from it.
Self-knowledge is not salvation, but without it, moral life is impossible. We must face the truth. Truth does not guarantee hope, but lies guarantee degradation.
Silence sustains corruption as effectively as violence. Think of Charles Peguy: He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers. In authoritarian systems, inaction is never neutral.
Freedom without purpose collapses into nihilism. A society can destroy people without ever touching them. Santiago Zavala teaches us that seeing clearly is not enough, rejecting corruption is not the same as opposing it, moral purity can mask cowardice. Silence is a choice. Truth hurts but ignorance corrodes.
Santiago is not a failed hero. He is something more unsettling: a decent man undone by clarity without courage. That makes him one of the most modern protagonists in literature.
Vargas Llosa does not condemn Santiago Zavala.
He mourns him and through him, mourns a generation and a country. But that mourning is severe, unsentimental, and morally demanding.
Santiago’s failures are shown from the inside, through fatigue, confusion, bitterness, and shame. Santiago’s sin is passivity, not cruelty. Vargas Llosa treats passivity as tragic, not monstrous.
The novel insists that authoritarian systems deform moral life. They make sustained resistance psychologically exhausting. They reward cynicism and punish hope. Santiago is damaged by the regime, not simply weak within it. Freedom is fragile; its absence destroys people quietly.
Santiago once believed in justice, political change, and ethical coherence. His collapse is not just personal. It marks the failure of an entire generation of intellectuals. Vargas Llosa is mourning wasted intelligence, aborted moral ambition, and courage that never matured.
The obsessive reconstruction of memory scene after scene, and voice after voice is a literary vigil.
Vargas Llosa’s compassion does not equal exoneration. Santiago is responsible for his silence, for his withdrawal, and for letting disgust replace action. But responsibility is shown as human, limited, and historically conditioned.
Santiago embodies the damage corruption does before it produces monsters. Vargas Llosa once wrote (paraphrased across essays): Literature exists because reality is insufficient. Santiago is insufficient, and the novel exists to make up for that insufficiency. The novel does what Santiago cannot: it speaks, remembers, accuses and refuses to forget.
Vargas Llosa does not hate Santiago Zavala. He grieves for him as one grieves for wasted talent, a stunted moral life, a freedom that came too late. He writes the novel not to save Santiago but to warn the reader: Do not let clarity turn into surrender.
It’s an important lesson for us today.