az- The Storyteller: A Novel: Books: Mario Vargas Llosa:

publishers weekly: The narrator tells of his college friend Saul Zuratas, a man obsessed with preserving the culture of the Machiguengas, a tiny, isolated tribe threatened both by rapacious rubber barons destroying the Amazon jungle and the missionaries who want to bring the Machiguengas into the 20th century. Saul, called Mascarita because of a disfiguring facial birthmark, and doubly an outsider because he is a Jew, has a particular sensitivity to this primitive tribe that seeks to live peacefully with the natural world. The narrative alternates the story of Saul's obsession with chapters relating the Machiguengas' myths, stories handed down by the hablador , or storyteller. Through a remarkable coincidence, the narrator discovers that the mystery surrounding the habladores can be traced to Saul, who has found his destiny among the tribe.

Clare liked this book, lent it to me ~ senior year ~ and I did not care so much for it. but I think of it, think of disappearing - here is a story of someone who found people to disappear to.

librjounrl: In alternating chapters, he tells the story of Saul Zuratas, a Peruvian Jew who becomes an habladore (storyteller) to the Machiguengas--a tribe still wandering the Amazon jungle--and the tribe's stories themselves.

cust rvws:

-A Peruvian writer explores his own past when he encounters a picture of a Machiguenga storyteller in an Italian gallery. He believes that ths storyteller in the photograph is not himself Machinguenga, but is instead a friend of his youth, Saul Zuratas.
A story about telling stories, and all the different ways that there are to tell (and receive) stories. From the Kafka parrot, to the narrator's stint as a television producer huh did not remember, to the storyteller's stories themselves, this is a book which struggles with identity and with the real. The character of Saul is notable for his lack of place and his struggle as both a monster and an angel to exist in the world of Peru.

-He understood what it meant to have no solid ground on which to stand. Saul Zuratas took it all the way. He abandoned the modern world and joined with a culture that was trying to avoid being assimilated.

-We need more Sauls!

-A modern man goes through a stunning transformation into that of a savage, seen from the viewpoint of an old friend staring at his picture in Florence, trying to imagine the journey his friend had taken upon himself, alone, scarred, and in the dense jungle of magic.
..a story about a Peruvian academic and outsider becoming a Machiguenga. an outsider, now a central member of an exclusive and ancient order, of the determination and resolve, ("that of a lunatic or a saint"), that drove him onward.

-A story of magic and pasion. In somewhere, in the Peruvian Amazon there's a man that preserves the memory of a tribe that the time and the progress?!? (nor the religion or the factories) have not killed yet. This tribe keep their miths alive because of this storyteller, who is always walking, looking for new stories to tell, there in the hughe jungle.