There are many directions in which book club readers can turn after they have finished our Sunday Arts Section (SAS) Book Club choice for September, The Dream of the Celt by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The Peruvian writer's story of Irish nationalist Roger Casement, condemned to death in England for treason after he exposes atrocities in the Belgian Congo, is sure to spark readers' interest in exploring other books by Vargas Llosa and other books about how politics shapes history.
Like The Dream of the Celt, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, demonstrates how society creates circumstances that cause ordinary citizens to abandon their own personal sense of morals and values. This is a fascinating topic for a book club.Andre Brink tackled the same theme in A Dry White Season, the story of a loyal white Afrikaaner whose beliefs about his country are shaken to the core when he realises the atrocities his government is involved in after he learns about the death of a black janitor's son.
Latin American writers have a penchant for exposing corrupt or brutal political systems through literature.
Any of the following books would be a thought-provoking follow-up for The Dream of the Celt:
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Colombian Nobel laureate explores the impact of the United Fruit Co on a fictitious, rural area swallowed up by a ruthless American company.
2. Before Night Falls, by Reinaldo Arenas. This Cuban writer's autobiography exposes the political horrors of Fidel Castro's regime, particularly its homophobia and its harsh stand on homosexuality.
3. Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia. One might expect Garcia, a Cuban-American writer, to represent the feelings of those upper-class Cubans who fled Castro's regime. Instead, Garcia has penned an amazingly unbiased book that shows how Cuban families found themselves divided over Castro's politics.
The Dream of the Celt will undoubtedly lead readers back to the source of the story, the Congo River, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where they will discover how other writers have used this classic to frame their own novels. Indian writer Arundhati Roy used a river and the theme of prejudice to write her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things.The Secret History of Costaguana by Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez tells the history of Panama relying on allusions to Conrad and his book Nostromo. Vasquez is an unusual writer who probes the relationship between history and politics in a whole new light.There have been a number of books written about Roger Casement. Casement's diaries are also available for readers to buy.
Check out the SAS Book Club group on Facebook and tell us about your favourite books about politics and history.
Next week: The SAS Book Club presents our October SAS Book Club choice:The President's Hat, by Antoine Laurain. A book club always needs a challenge and here it is: discover a whole new world of fiction from Gallic Press, a publisher in England that specialises in translating French bestsellers.