Word: llosa
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Weekend Entertainment GuideThis book marks the return to the high literary intensity that Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa mastered before he detoured into public life with his unsuccessful 1990 campaign for his country's presidency. It's a welcome return, says TIME's Paul Gray. What starts as a simple murder-mystery puzzle in the Andes mountains rapidly becomes an attempt to track down, through the labyrinth of fiction, experiences that defy rational explanation. "There is a spookiness about this novel, one that is hard to convey," says Gray. "But Vargas Llosa's meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving...
Books: Mario Vargas Llosa on his attempt to lead Peru...
...wheel of fortune." At the time, he thought of his decision to campaign for the presidency as a "moral" one. "Circumstances," he writes, "placed me in a position of leadership at a critical moment in the life of my country." But that's what all politicians say. Vargas Llosa the writer is now willing to dig a bit deeper into his reasoning. "If the decadence, the impoverishment, the terrorism, and the multiple crises of Peruvian society had not made it an almost impossible challenge to govern such a country, it would never have entered my head to accept such...
...Vargas Llosa intersperses his account of his public life with chapters about his childhood and youth, beginning with a vivid and traumatic memory. One day when he was 10 years old, his mother revealed to him that his father had not died before little Mario was born, as he had always been told, but was alive and was waiting in a nearby hotel to meet his son for the first time. The boy was not amused. The reasppearance of Ernesto J. Vargas, who had abandoned his wife a few months into her pregnancy, meant that Mario was yanked...
...fiction, the cruelties experienced in childhood might be used to explain the adult who survived them, but Vargas Llosa does not attempt to make such connections here. The sections on the campaign and those on his youth run along parallel tracks, and the story of his early life trails off after he graduates from college and decides to go to Europe and write. Both stories have a matter-of-fact air about them that suggests the author is more inerested in remembering his past than in interpreting...