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Link to original content: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/970803.03parinit.html
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August 3, 1997
The Truth of LiesBy JAY PARINI
Mario Vargas Llosa insists on keeping literature and history in separate compartments
Read the First Chapter
More on Mario Vargas Llosa from The New York Times Archives
MAKING WAVES
By Mario Vargas Llosa.
Edited and translated by John King.
338 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.50.
iterature is a form of permanent insurrection,'' said Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, in a 1967 essay called ''Literature Is Fire.'' ''Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.'' He was at that time a phenomenon: a 31-year-old writer who, with only two novels to his name, had become a major figure in the so-called boom in Latin American literature.
Three decades later, Vargas Llosa is a writer whose inventiveness and ambition have yielded 11 novels, including ''Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'' (1982) and ''The War of the End of the World'' (1984), as well as an assortment of short stories, plays, critical studies and essays.
Until now, the essays have been largely unavailable in English, but a substantial collection embracing three decades of work has just been published. ''Making Waves,'' edited and translated by John King, is a diverse and representative volume that allows us, for the first time, to trace this enigmatic, often brilliant writer's controversial, occasionally baffling intellectual journey.
The controversial part has to do with Vargas Llosa's politics, which in the 1980's veered to the right. From the outside, it looked as if he had gone from Marx to Mrs. Thatcher in the twinkling of an eye, from a firebrand socialist to the free marketeer who ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 but lost, much to everyone's surprise, to a relatively unknown challenger, Alberto K. Fujimori. This ideological turn did not, of course, endear Vargas Llosa to his former comrades in letters. Was his call for writers ''to arouse, to disturb, to alarm'' mere blandishment?
If one reads ''Literature Is Fire'' more closely, one begins to understand. The young Mario Vargas Llosa stated clearly that ''dogma, censorship and arbitrary acts are also mortal enemies of progress and human dignity,'' noting that ''the road to truth is not always smooth and straight.'' Like other Latin American writers in the late 50's and the 60's, he applauded Fidel Castro, but by 1971 he had come to reject the Cuban model. This was made clear in several open letters, one of which is reprinted here. It concerns the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla and the subsequent coercion of certain prominent Cuban intellectuals to back Fidel: ''To force comrades, with methods repugnant to human dignity, to accuse themselves of imaginary betrayals and sign letters in which even the syntax seems to be that of the police, is the negation of everything that made me embrace, from the first day, the cause of the Cuban revolution: its decision to fight for justice without losing respect for individuals.''
A similar resistance to the brutal aspect of state socialism can be found in ''Socialism and the Tanks,'' written shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Vargas Llosa wrote: ''The sending of Soviet tanks into Prague to suppress a movement of socialist democratization is as much to be condemned as the dispatching of American marines to Santo Domingo to stamp out by violence a popular uprising against a military dictatorship and an unjust social system.''
''Making Waves'' is fascinating, in part, because one can follow the twists and turns of the writer's mind as he tries, again and again, to find a balance between social justice and individual freedom, searching for models and arguments everywhere from Sartre and Camus to Isaiah Berlin. In ''The Mandarin'' (1980), Vargas Llosa reconsidered his youthful attachment to Sartre: ''One could say that he was full of contradictions, that his passion often caused him to be unjust and yet, at the same time, there was always a basic generosity and moral honesty in his attitudes and ideas that made him, with all his mistakes and political naivete, respectable.'' In a strange way, this might also be taken as a description of the essayist himself. As he grappled with the complex political realities of South America, he moved inexorably from a naive utopianism to a version of liberalism that involves a commitment to the free market and a passionate attachment to individual liberty.
This classic liberalism includes a belief in pluralism, and here Isaiah Berlin proved an astute guide. In a major reformulation of his principles, Vargas Llosa wrote in 1980:
''Reading Isaiah Berlin, I have come to see clearly something that I had intuited in a confused way. That real progress, which has withered or overthrown the barbarous practices and institutions that were the source of infinite suffering for man, and has established more civilized relations and styles of life, has always been achieved through a partial, heterodox and deformed application of social theories.''
The descent of Mario Vargas Llosa into the crude, exhilarating world of everyday politics in the late 80's has been fully described in his memoir, ''A Fish in the Water'' (1994). But one is able to comprehend that plunge more fully having tracked his gradual movement toward liberal pragmatism.
A fair number of the essays in this collection deal with the complex negotiations that occur between fact and fiction. ''Only literature has the techniques and powers to distill this delicate elixir of life: the truth hidden in the heart of human lies,'' he says in ''The Truth of Lies.'' He insists on keeping literature and history in separate compartments, seeing this as ''a prerogative of open societies.'' For him, a ''closed society'' is one where governments can force writers to heel to an interpretation of the facts that legitimizes a given regime.
On the other hand, when writers are allowed to produce an alternative vision, ''literature extends human life, adding the dimension that fuels the life deep within us -- that impalpable and fleeting but precious life that we only live through lies.'' While this is nicely phrased, Karl Popper's terminology sounds oddly outdated in the post-cold-war era, where ''open'' and ''closed'' seem inadequate in the face of such well-managed fantasies as the New World Order. How does one, for example, deal with the endless ''fictions'' thrown up -- by ''open'' societies -- as historical truth?
Vargas Llosa is perhaps at his best on particular writers, himself included. There is an entertaining piece on Hemingway as memoirist, a shrewd critique of Joyce's ''Dubliners,'' a workmanlike reconsideration of Dos Passos' ''Manhattan Transfer'' and two sharp essays on Faulkner. ''Faulkner's world was really not his alone,'' he suggests. ''It was ours.'' He finds stunning parallels between Faulkner's Mississippi and the world of the Latin American novel, including ''violence, heat, greed, an untamable nature which seems to reflect instincts that people do not try to keep in check.''
Some of the finest moments in the book are in those essays where the novelist speaks in the first person, taking us back to his childhood in Peru and Bolivia in ''The Country of a Thousand Faces,'' to his days as a graduate student in Madrid in ''When Madrid Was a Village,'' and to his years of self-imposed exile in Paris -- a subject that recurs in many of these pieces. In all, Vargas Llosa offers a detailed road map of his imaginative world in ''Making Waves,'' and readers of his fiction can only be grateful.
Jay Parini's fifth novel, ''Benjamin's Crossing,'' has just been published. He teaches literature at Middlebury College.
From the Archives of The New York TimesREVIEWS:
"The Time of the Hero" (1966)
"The young Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa... is concerned less with society than with growth and change in the individual and the mystery of how these are accomplished.""Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" reviewed by William Kennedy (1982)
"And now for something entirely different from Latin America: a comic novel that is genuinely funny.""The War of the End of the World" reviewed by Robert Stone (1984)
"Based on events in South America at the end of the 19th century, itsucceeds brilliantly in penetrating and opening to examination the ancient significance of the millenarian myth.""The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary" reviewed by Julian Barnes (1986)
"Mario Vargas Llosa fell deeply in love with Emma from the moment he first read ''Madame Bovary'' - in Paris in 1959 - and at the start of this unconventional, shiningly intelligent and fiercely sensible homage to Flaubert he recounts how ever since he has been in thrall to Emma's social rebelliousness, her erotic power, her vulgarity and her promise of violence. ""The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta" reviewed by Robert Coover (1986)
"There are in fact two stories in ''Mayta'' - that of the title character and his abortive guerrilla uprising, and that of the unnamed narrator-investigator and his frustrated fictional exploration of this particular but elusive moment in past time.""Who Killed Palomino Molero?" (1987)
"Evoking landscape and mores in writing that is spare, rich and cruelly beautiful, he both satisfies the requirements of the detective genre and demonstrates that it too can resonate like any other form of fiction.""The Storyteller" reviewed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1989)
"'The Storyteller' is science fiction at its best. Accurately following the investigations of a science - anthropology, in this case - as far as they have gone, it then asks: what if?""In Praise of the Stepmother" reviewed by Anthony Burgess (1990)
"Acts of foreplay are described here fully but chastely; the erogenous zones are poeticized; art hovers over all.""A Writer's Reality" (1991)
"But Mr. Vargas Llosa is less concerned with politics than he is with method, and with the technical and personal anguish of writing a novel.""A Fish in the Water: A Memoir" (1994)
" It serves as his mea culpa: he explains why the aspiring writer of the 1950's became a politician in the late 1980's and why, in the end, this was a terrible mistake.""Death in the Andes" (1996)
"The foreground of this novel seems confusingly disorganized from start to finish. The individual vignettes are often brilliant, but neither Lituma nor the reader nor perhaps the author himself can put them all coherently together."ALSO:
Is Fiction the Art of Living? (1984) by Mario Vargas Llosa
"Ever since I wrote my first short story, people have asked if what I wrote 'was true.' Though my replies sometimes satisfy their curiosity, I am left each time, no matter how sincere my answer, with a nagging sense of having said something that's not quite on target."Politics Nevermore, Vargas Llosa Says, Embracing Writing (1990)
"Alive and apparently unscathed after three years in pursuit of the presidency, Mr. Vargas Llosa says he is disappointed but also "a bit relieved" that the electorate rejected him in June."Vargas Llosa Disparages Peru, and Vice Versa (1993)
"Ask Peruvians about Mario Vargas Llosa and more often than not the reaction is surprisingly bitter. "
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