Search Results

“... Mario VargasLlosa 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 ...”

“... The Perpetual Orgy (1975) – the title is a phrase of Flaubert’s for the life of writing – Mario VargasLlosa says what he likes in novels: ‘the greatest satisfaction a novel can give me is by stimulating, as I read, my admiration for some act of rebellion; my anger at some stupidity or injustice; my ...”

“... displaced the overripe, over-imitated Márquez from the top of my list: Julio Cortázar and Mario VargasLlosa. The first constructed a dream of Buenos Aires and Paris, balancing paper-thin speculations in a bubble of eternal studenthood. The second couldn’t have been more different. A pungent brutality steeped ...”

“... rat-eyed leader of a CIA-funded ‘liberation’ army. They already seem cribbed from a novel by Mario VargasLlosa. All he had to do was lift them out and plop them down in his latest book, without bothering to do much by way of embellishment.Harsh Times, an understatement of a title, rehearses the coup in Guatemala ...”

“... who first drew attention to the crimes committed in the Congo in the name of progress and trade. Mario VargasLlosa wrote about them in an essay published in 2001: ‘Both deserve the honours of a great novel.’ Such a novel would have to live in the shadow of the short work Conrad produced nine years after he left ...”

“... to discuss it with the American Treasury Secretary. De Soto says he was prompted to write it by Mario VargasLlosa, who himself introduces it and has in effect made it his manifesto for the Presidential election in Peru next year. Its first part is a report of research done in the Peruvian capital by de Soto’s own ...”

“... Reasons of State (1974), Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and now Mario VargasLlosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000). The time lag is probably significant, since the latest book is the most literal and least hypnotised of the four. This is a virtue, but not entirely a virtue. On the ...”

“... inventing a biographer-narrator to fight a long rearguard action against the death of the author. Mario VargasLlosa’s The Perpetual Orgy (first published in 1975, and only now translated into English) is the work of a novelist whose creative imagination more than equals that of Barnes in complexity and ...”

“... In the autumn of 1967 in London, I coincided with the Peruvian novelist Mario VargasLlosa. We had both read, recently and with admiration, as well as a touch of envy, Edmund Wilson’s masterly portraits of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore. Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America ...”

“... cannon, carbine, dynamite and bayonet. Faber’s blurb is misleading, though, when it describes Mario VargasLlosa’s newly-translated novel (first published in Spanish in 1981) as ‘inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history’. Misleading not because Canudos is not ‘a real episode’ – it took place all ...”

“... crucial figure for a narrating Jewish protagonist, though here not the main narrator (a version of Llosa himself, much as in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984)), but the ‘storyteller’ of the title, Saul Zuratas. The Kafka Saul is involved with is really the author, though, only of one story, ‘Metamorphosis’. Saul is a red-haired, hideously ...”

“... hoped that the 1990 General Election would be a turning-point. They pinned their hopes on Mario VargasLlosa. An internationally famous writer, elegant and urbane, Vargas Llosa was the man of light for those who believed in ‘the middle way’ between Sendero and the ...”

“... to investigate what had happened; it included several Peruvian anthropologists and was headed by Mario VargasLlosa. The commission members were helicoptered into Uchuraccay, where they spent a morning. Some time later, they produced a report that blamed the murders on the violent nature of Peru’s indigenous ...”

“... in this as in other respects to compare him with his great contemporary from neighbouring Peru, Mario VargasLlosa, and not only because the two were good friends for a time before a celebrated falling-out. Martin has some interesting passages pointing to the parallels between their lives: difficulties with their ...”

“... and mother of Enrique Iglesias by her first husband, Julio) was there with her latest consort, Mario VargasLlosa; Carmen Martínez-Bordiú, Franco’s granddaughter, whose popularity has risen since she appeared on the Spanish version of Strictly Come Dancing, was also in attendance. Matadors have been welcomed ...”