In the course of Mario Vargas Llosa’s seventy-nine years, Peru has alternated between dictatorship and democracy with the sort of regularity that other countries experience through mere shiftings from one political party to another. During his nation’s most violent and despairing periods, Vargas Llosa must keenly have felt the truth of his own repeated assertion that the writer of fiction wishes to replace the world as it is with another one entirely.
His novels, the latest of which, “The Discreet Hero” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), appears this month in the United States, have arisen from what Vargas Llosa calls Peru’s “effervescent structure of prejudices and sentiments,” the racebased obsession with social hierarchy which has helped produce the country’s calamitous political history. His books ignore none of Peru’s clashing, kaleidoscopic elements, but…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, Mar-16-15