*Piura

*Piura. Provincial city in Peru where Vargas Llosa grew up, attended college, and wrote for a local newspaper. The Green House draws upon experiences he had there; its story line about the virgin Bonifacia, who is taken from the Amazon jungle to the Piura brothel is inspired by a trip he made with anthropologists on which he saw how Indian girls were drafted into prostitution.

Green House

Green House. Piura brothel around which the novel’s stories are interwoven in a nonlinear narrative. The novel’s title links the primal lusts of civilization in Piura, embodied by the whorehouse, with the primitive world of the lush, green jungle.

*Amazon basin

*Amazon basin. Rain forest region that extends from Brazil into eastern Peru. The novel opens on a tributary of the great Amazon River on which two nuns are being boated downstream by a rowdy crew of police and military men. The characters melt into a landscape of casual talk and flood of visual observation. No narrator sorts out which characters are important or what is going on. After thirteen pages without a single paragraph break, the novel suddenly cuts to a scene with different characters, who seem unrelated to what has gone before them. The entire book follows the pattern established in its opening pages. Past and present flow together. What happens first is never told first. Every beginning is instead the end of something begun earlier. In this way Vargas Llosa suggests that the jungle river, like the oddly constructed house painted green, is a metaphor for the world of Piura and for the Latin American experience in general. This experience involves struggles to separate what is real from what is fiction, what is indigenous from what is European culture, what is men’s life from what is women’s life, what is the modernity of urbanization and what is traditional culture as experienced through the magical landscapes of both city and jungle.

Vargas Llosa relies on a spiral, flowing narrative mode, characterized by a flood of text, unmarked by paragraph indentations, or quotation marks—much like that of the Maranon River with its “six violent miles of whirlpools, rocks, and torrents.”

Vargas Llosa employs various techniques to vividly and objectively depict the environments influencing each character's actions. To present a realistic surface, he often uses cinematic techniques like an omniscient "camera eye" that captures details and objects within a scene. The complex structure is primarily achieved through montage, a technique borrowed from film, which not only juxtaposes different time periods but also contrasts a character's past and present across various settings.

Additionally, Vargas Llosa utilizes a method known by critics as the telescoping of dialogues. This involves placing side by side the conversations of different characters about the same event from various points in time. These dialogues span the immediate present, a recent past, and a more distant past, effectively collapsing the distance between these time frames by shifting from the present to the past and back again.

In The Green House, spanning approximately forty years, Vargas Llosa explores Peru's social conditions through two distinct settings: the jungle region of Santa Maria de Nieva, home to a mission and military post along the upper Maranon River in the Amazon, and Piura, a provincial town in northwestern Peru. By intertwining multiple storylines, he simultaneously highlights various social issues.

The tragic consequences of attempts to Christianize the indigenous population are illustrated by the fate of young Aguaruna Indian girls, who are kidnapped by Spanish nuns—assisted by soldiers stationed at Santa Maria de Nieva—to be trained at the mission....