sickness during the bombardment, was exhumed and his head cut off and taken away. Despite its nearly 600 pages, the novel was a quick and compelling read. For the most part, the story is told straightforwardly with little of the jumping around of narrative voice and sequence one tends to expect in high-brow literature. The characters were all fully realized and psychologically rich. Vargas Llosa masterfully paints the full panoply of war scenes that seem to have become movie clichs in the 30 years since publication. We encounter the terror of new troops on the battlefield, the assault of the poorly armed against overwhelming force, unhinged valor, the tension of undergoing bombardment, troops finishing off their wounded officer, etc. It also had the fervid sex scenes that seem (at least in my limited experience) nearly obligatory for so many Latin American authors. My guess is that Vargas Llosa intended this novel to be something of a Latin American Aeneid serving to link the struggles of today's dispossessed with a heroic and tragic past. I've read that he wrote the novel in Portuguese, rather than his usual Spanish, to achieve more nuance. That all obviously went over the head of this low brow reader. Nevertheless, the novel was meaningful to me in three ways: (1)as a history lesson,(2)as a military campaign that can be usefully compared to others, and (3) as a moral question. I was unaware of Canudos before reading this novel. Because of this I did a little reading