In his appraisal in the New York Times Dwight Garner overlooks El sueño del celta (2010), which, among the novels I have read, is my favorite. Interweaving Roger Casement’s last days in prison with flashbacks from his life, Vargas Llosa presents us with a fictionalized biography – yet based on thorough documentation – of a tormented man, a staunch anti-colonialist, a passionate defender of human rights and the indigenous cultures of his time, an Irish nationalist… and a homosexual.
To be read together with the excellent edition of Casement’s The Black Diaries by Jeffrey Dudgeon (Belfast Press, 2016).
