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Mario Vargas Llosa’s Mad Peru | The New Yorker

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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 race-based 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 his vision, sometimes explicit and more often artistically indirect, is at bottom a gentlemanly, non-millenarian one, desirous of peac

Save this story Save this story Vargas Llosa has a zookeeper’s tenderness for the human “fauna” he describes in his fiction. Illustration by Patrick Bremer 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 on

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