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This is Vargas Llosa's longest and most ambitious novel, about life and politics in Peru. The premise is that Santiago Zavala, a middle aged newspaperman, and his father's former chauffeur Ambrosio meet by accident after many years and go to La Catedral (a bar, not a church) to reminisce about their past lives. The book is ostensibly a record of their conversation, and the stream-of-consciousness of their recollections while discussing. However, there are at least two other major characters, Amalia and don Cayo Bermudez, who seem to "participate" in the conversation although not there, with facts and memories that the two in the bar could not know.

The novel has frequently been compared to Ulysses, and the style is somewhat similar -- certainly, this is a novel that could not have been written without Joyce, but that can be said about most modernist fiction. Actually, Ulysses is fairly straightforward and simple compared to this book; the events recounted take place over a decade or more rather than one day, with the chronology very much mixed, there are more major characters, and very much unlike Joyce the book is concerned with politics.

This novel builds up from his previous books; they all have the switching from one time and place to another, and in each one the episodes become shorter and more mixed in time. Conversacion takes this as far as possible; while some episodes last a few pages, some chapters are made up entirely of alternating sentences from three or more different episodes months or years apart The challenge is putting them all together and figuring out the order of the events. As in the other novels, characters are often referred to by more than one name so it sometimes comes as a revelation that two characters in two episodes are actually the same person. The book makes heavy demands on memory, as much of the interest comes in connecting something with a name that was mentioned casually in passing dialogue a hundred pages earlier. the difficulty of this was compounded for me because, given its length and the fact that I was reading it in Spanish (not my first or even my best second language), I alternated it with other books. Altogether, I worked on this over about two months.

Going from the style to the content, this is largely, though not entirely, a book about politics. It takes place mainly under the dictatorship of General Odriia (from 1948 to 1956) and immediately after; unlike La Fiesta del Chivo, to which there are some resemblances, in which Trujillo is a major character, Odriia himself never appears in the book directly; it could be subtitled the rise and fall of Cayo Bermudez (the Minister of Government, i.e. the head of the security forces).

The political context of the book has definite limitations; as in the previous novels, the peasantry (the overwhelming majority of the Peruvian population) is nowhere in sight, without a single peasant character. The action is virtually all urban, and the entire story is told from the perspective of the ruling class, their domestic servants and hangers-on. There is nothing about the economic or social problems of the country; the emphasis is on corruption and absence of formal democracy. In short, what one would expect from a neo-liberal such as Vargas Llosa. All the characters (with the possible exception of the Communist students near the beginning) are either corrupt or cynical, or in the case of the female characters passive victims who play no active role in events. However, despite its limitations it probably gives a good idea of the life and thought of the upper middle class in Peru at the time, and the ideas of the various bourgeois factions that ultimately brought down the regime.

Finally though, this is a book that is better read for its literary style than for content.