Llosa's Works: the City and the Dog
About This Novel
The story begins with several military academy cadets planning to steal chemistry test papers and sell test questions. The school authorities discovered the theft and ordered the thief to surrender, otherwise the entire class would be punished. Someone reported the thief, and the "boss" of the theft gang vowed to find the informer. Soon, during a live-fire exercise, a cadet nicknamed "Slave" was shot and killed... "City and Dogs" was written by Vargas Llosa based on his personal experience of studying in a military academy as a boy. It is set on the Leoncio Prado Military School in Lima, the capital of Peru, and the bustling city of Lima. It revolves around several military academy cadets and depicts the brutal lives of the cadets and their various conflicts with the school authorities. This was the first novel published by Vargas Llosa when he was 27 years old. In 1962, before the novel was published, it won the Spanish Concise Book Series Award. After its publication in 1963, it won the Spanish Critics Award, making Vargas Llosa famous in one fell swoop. The novel was banned in the author's native Peru shortly after its publication. The military government at the time burned 1,500 copies of the Peruvian edition of "Cities and Dogs" at the Leoncio Prado Military School, the author's alma mater. The City and the Dog is considered by some critics to be one of four landmark novels (the other three being Carlos Fuentes' "The Death of Artemio Cross," Julio Cortázar's "Hopscotch" and García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude") that marked the unfolding of the Latin American literary explosion. In 2001, the book was selected as one of the "100 Best Spanish Novels of the 20th Century" by Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
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