Darkest Peru

John Sturrock

  • The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa
    Faber, 310 pp, £9.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 571 14579 5
  • The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Randolph Hogan
    Cape, 106 pp, £8.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 224 02160 5

Mario Vargas Llosa has written a fine novel, political and unstintingly pessimistic, a dire collation of the fiasco of a single Peruvian life with the chronic mismanagement and distempers of Peru. As narrative, it may be complicatedly told, with much canny transiting between present and past, but the formal ingenuities work to the one end, of delivering a full and unhappy report on the way things have been or are in the novelist’s homeland.

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[*] Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Writer of Colombia. Cape, 186 pp., £10.95, 5 March, 0 224 02384 5.