Alongside VS Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood and perhaps one or two others, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa belongs to that elite club of Grand Old Men and Women of Letters. He is also the only A-list writer to be a passionate Castro-hater and arch-Thatcherite.
These essays and features, culled mainly from Vargas Llosa’s regular columns for El País and a Spanish-language collection called ‘La Verdad de las Mentiras’, follows on from an earlier anthology, ‘Making Waves’. The titles tell a story – whereas the earlier volume was provocative, enlivened by a younger Peruvian man’s experience often at odds with his ‘European’ education, and occasionally unsure of its voice, this new selection is Arnoldian in its mastery of themes and materials. Thus, whether Vargas Llosa is writing about Iraq, Günter Grass or the Madrid train bombs, his prose permits no wavering or hesitation, no self-doubt or self-indulgence. Ironically, this turns out to be the book’s Achilles heel.
Vargas Llosa is too canonical in his tastes. We get solid but predictable digests of Nabokov, Neruda, Conrad and Woolf, while Cervantes and Borges appear on every other page, like reliable props for an author who (we suspect) has a bit of an inferiority complex. Vargas Llosa’s political journalism is a satisfactory blend of reportage and analysis, but some of the pieces – such as those written in the aftermath of 9/11, when it looked like the US might not invade Afghanistan – have dated badly, and his ‘Iraq Diary’ is too long, too earnest and too similar to every other news feature written about that hellhole.
The best pieces are short and throwaway: ‘How I Lost My Fear of Flying’ (by reading gripping fiction during turbulence) and ‘Chilean Yawns’ (on the benefits of dull democracy in a continent of ‘colourful’ dictators). Unfortunately, there are too few of these in the 350-plus pages. Vargas Llosa needs to let his guard down and free up his imagination.
