Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics (review)

Abstract

CASTRO, JUAN E. DE, AND NICHOLAS BIRNS, EDS. Vargas LIOSO and Latin American Politics. New York: Macmillan, 2010. xi + 235 pp.Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics is a collection of eleven essays by an equal number of scholars focusing on Vargas Llosa's writings after the Peruvian author's neoliberal turn, and thus encompassing the author's novels and essays (and autobiographical memoir) published between the early 1980s and the present. The book is divided into four sections more or less chronologically and analytically arranged. The essays that explicitly deal with the evolution of Vargas Llosa's political ideas since the 1960s are collected in the first two sections. The stages of Vargas Llosa's political journey are well known: the socialism of the 1960s (the decade of the Literature is Fire speech), a transitional social- democratic phase in the 1970s, and the final embrace of neoliberalism in the 1980s, culminating with the author's Confessions of a Liberal speech with which he accepted the Irving Kristol Award in 2005. (Juan E. de Castro's essay on Vargas Llosa's brand of liberalism and its differences with North American neoconservatism is particularly useful). The final two sections of the book either drift away from the narrowly political or relocate it in the broader context of Vargas Llosa as a public intellectual.The chapters vary in style, with the scholarly monograph, the sophisticated book review, and the essay coming together to form a somewhat heterogeneous whole supplemented by a bio-bibliographical timeline and a useful introduction that traces Vargas Llosa's political career. Two of the chapters, furthermore, had previously appeared in professional journals. The editors did not limit contributors to any one point of view on Vargas Llosa's politics nor did they insist that the contributions specifically address works of fiction. A Fish in the Water, Vargas Llosa's 1993 autobiographical memoir, figures prominently throughout the book - in fact, Sergio R. Franco's reading ofthat work is one of the high points of the collection - and several of the essays follow their course without mentioning any of Vargas Llosa's novels. When these are mentioned in passing or probed in depth, the titles that stand out are The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, The War of the End of the World, The Storyteller, Death in the Andes, and The Feast of the Goat. A theme that runs throughout the book is the duality in Vargas Llosa between politics and literature, since the author's overall project may be defined as the attempt to preserve the autonomy of fiction without compromising the political relevance of the total novel.Three of the essays in the collection deal squarely with this duality by reading specific novels in their political context. Thus, Nicholas Birns argues that The War of the End of the World is not so much a critique of leftist utopianism as a tug-ofwar between Mario Vargas Llosa, the skeptical intellectual of the late 1970s, and Euclides Da Cunha, the positivist intellectual of the turn of the 20th century, whose Os sertoes functions as the hypotext of Vargas Llosa's account of the events that transpired in the Brazilian backlands in the 1890s. This is one of several novels in the Vargas Llosa canon that problematically incorporate a European perspective (synonymous with modernity) in a narrated world populated by ethnographic others. (El sueno del celta, the author's most recent novel to date, is another such example). One wishes that Birn had spent less time dwelling on the differences between a postmodern novel and a late-nineteenth-century scientific treatise and more on discussing how the self-dismantling of European interpretive paradigms in Os sertoes conditions a modern reading of the Canudo events and of Vargas Llosa's novel. Os sertoes is structured in terms of several correlated oppositions: coastline/desert, science/religion, European race/inferior races. But these oppositions do not remain stable throughout the book because as the author travels through the backlands and becomes more familiar with the region's physical and human geography, his initial prejudices and faith in positivist science falter and are replaced by a more complex vision of Brazilian reality, one drawn from an original knowledge of the country and not derived from European science. …