Mario Vargas Llosa has set about the Latin American literary task—to portray the collision of indigenous and Enlightenment-influenced cultures—with a rare combination of daring and common sense. In A Writer’s Reality we see it is this combination that makes his novels scintillating without leaving the reader stranded in metafictional abstractions, and that allows him to delve into racial difference without patronizing the humble native, or, indeed, anyone else.
A Writer’s Reality consists of what appear to be barely altered transcriptions of lectures the Peruvian author gave at Syracuse University in 1988. As such, it is a much more repetitive and meandering book than it should have been. Yet even unsmoothed by an editor, it adds up to a satisfying literary manifesto. Two initial chapters on New World history and letters are followed by six chapters on six of Vargas Llosa’s ten novels, each chapter a window on the writer’s artistic intentions and the technical refinements he devised to try to achieve them.
Vargas Llosa has been known to cut an iconoclastic swath through the contemporary scene, and here he does not disappoint. But even as he slams the nouveau roman in art and Marxist utopianism in politics, a theme keeps popping up that ties him firmly to the South American tradition: the distortions that can happen when Western ideas and institutions are imported into South America.
As he gathered novelistic material on trips into Peru’s jungle interior, Vargas Llosa saw the two “Westernizing” institutions there— the