Word: llosa
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Mario Vargas Llosa the politician ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as a fiscal conservative. Happily, Vargas Llosa the winning novelist remains a staunch romantic libertarian. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 260 pages; $23) is, like his delectable Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977; translated into English in 1982), a roguish and sophisticated sex comedy with a few brain teasers tipped...
...heart of both books is a deep appreciation of individual liberty, a strong disdain for convention and a young man's infatuation with an interested older woman. Vargas Llosa forged his talent in such rebellious passions. In 1962, Peruvian authorities burned hundreds of copies of his politically explosive first novel, The City and the Dogs. The literary firebrand was also known for his precocious love life...
...himself in a government office in Lima "facing a photograph of the President of the Republic, who seemed to look at him sardonically from the wall." It is an odd moment for the reader because, had recent history turned out differently, that photograph might have been of Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990. Of course, had Vargas Llosa won that election, he almost certainly would not have had the time to write Death in the Andes...
...that would have been a shame, for this novel marks a return to the high literary intensity that Vargas Llosa had mastered before his temporary detour into Peruvian public life. It is an attempt to track down, through the labyrinth of fiction, experiences that defy rational explanation...
Lituma knows--indeed, everyone in the Andes seems to know--that the Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, is gaining control in the region. To underscore this point, Vargas Llosa inserts flashes of Sendero violence throughout the early portion of his narrative: the stoning to death of two young French tourists and a prominent ecologist visiting from Lima; the slaughter of a herd of vicunas being raised as a cash crop for the local economy; the invasion of a village in which residents are persuaded to massacre one another...