Questão 31 do ITA 2023

Conquistadores. By Fernando Cervantes. Viking; 512 pages; $35. Penguin, £12.99. A balanced retelling of the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru, which draws heavily on the letters and diaries of those involved. The author chronicles the brutality of the invaders but seeks to judge them by the values of their own times. The behaviour of Hernán Cortés and the rest was nurtured by a late-medieval religious culture, not purely by the lure of gold and still less by modern notions of statehood, he argues.

News of a Kidnapping. By Gabriel García Márquez. Translated by Edith Grossman. Vintage; 304 pages; $17. Penguin; £8.99. An unsurpassed journalistic account by Colombia’s most famous novelist of the horror inflicted by Pablo Escobar, the murderous drug-trafficker from Medellín, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It focuses on the kidnapping of Diana Turbay, a journalist and daughter of a former president, tracing the agonising choices of officials torn between national interest and personal ties.

The Feast of the Goat. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. Picador; 416 pages; $20. Faber & Faber; £8.99. Peru’s Nobel-prizewinning novelist is at his psychologically probing best in this fictionalised account of the moral corruption and political repression of the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the self-styled Generalissimo who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.

Beef, Bible and Bullets. By Richard Lapper. Manchester University Press; 272 pages; $29.95 and £11.99. A readable account of how Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidency in the election of 2018 through a culture war that forged an ad hoc coalition of farmers, evangelical Protestants and the security forces.