The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
Llosa, Mario Vargas
THE REAL LIFE OF ALEJANDRO MAYTA Mario Vargas Llosa/Farrar Straus Giroux/$16.95 Reid Buckley The beguiling Peruvian author, Mario Vargas, conspires in this work with a host of his contemporaries...
...Novelists are not the gods they seem to be taking themselves for...
...The major difference is that while Capote was fully in control of his material at 24, Miss Eberstadt is not quite there yet at 25...
...Well, I don't really know exactly why he is...
...I've changed dates, places, characters, I've created complications, added and taken away thousands of things...
...Against what is the imagination striving...
...Her slender donnee is smothered at times by mannered characterization and extravagant language: We sat in the conservatory drinking tea and rum in the late afternoon...
...Nothing...
...Finally, just before the inconclusive end: "The character in my novel is queer," I tell [Mayta] after a bit...
...All dissolves in "Kirzner lays bare the heart and soul of a progressing economy–people spotting market opportunities and creating new devices to exploit them...
...Gunter Grass of Dog's Years is a shade of the author of The Tin Drum...
...his alleged dismissal from the Party...
...Fowles played engrossingly with layers of reality, so that what at first seemed to be turned out not to have been, or not to have been as it at first seemed...
...This is the story of the narrator's search for the truth of the life of Alejandro Mayta, the protagonist...
...Journal of Commerce 1986 MediaGuide Jude Wanniski's Critical Review of the Print Media • A survey and evaluation of the major political economic press • Ratings of the leading political, foreign, financial reporters and columnists • A critical look at the big news events of 1985 AVAILABLE FROM 'N POLVCONOMICS, INC...
...Also to show the prejudices that exist with regard to his subject among those who supposedly want to liberate society from its defects...
...What is the excuse...
...Tb accentuate his marginality, his being a man full of contradictions...
...At one point the narrator is speaking to Blacquer, a Stalinist, an old foe of Mayta, who delivers his version of the split between Mayta and his RWP (T...
...Toward the end of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta the narrator has the effrontery to speak of his "invented classmate," so that even that justification for the narrator's compulsive investigations into the career of his historically petty and not greatly interesting central character is given the lie...
...The narrative, even at its most fantastic, carries the reader forward persuasively...
...He tells the real...
...and, finally the uprising itself, which lasts ten hours before failing ignominiously...
...Julian L. Simon DISCOVEflY and the CAPITALIST PROCESS ISRAEL M. KIRZNER In this stimulating book, Kirzner views capitalism as an ongoing process of creative discovery with the entrepreneur as discoverer...
...John Fowles plays similar tedious hob with reality and its mirrors in A Maggot...
...Start again...
...Oh, I don't think this is THE END...
...This is the novel writing itself, sort of...
...Sokolov declares the technique "spellbindingly successful," which in that novel's case it may be...
...Jezebel and Jem finally go to bed together on page 164...
...It's as if everybody has one book, and one only, of the marvelous insouciance of Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in him, which was a triumph that Sr...
...He asks and asks himself, What is the reason for all this...
...Well...
...It participates in the super-natural magic...
...A passage goes: "At the beginning, I didn't get it either, but now I think I do," says Blacquer [in reply to a question from the narrator...
...I submit that a formal nuttiness has infected the novel...
...She falls in love with Jem Chasm, a rich young Oxonian of bizarre appearance...
...Both books were writ-ten by very young authors...
...The narrator, a novelist, whose a.k.a...
...22.50 The University of Chicago Press Chicago 60637 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 41 smoke...
...6 /&-,`s $12.95 Vim` 11 plus $1.50 postage and handling represent the real Mr...
...Jezebel thereupon abandons his corpse and leaves Mexico "with all the world before me and a whole lot of debts to be paid...
...The RWP (T) had just thrown him out...
...Jezebel Western, the narrator of Low Tide, lives on New York's Upper East Side in a "dark intoxicating grave of a house" with her crazy mother and a wise black cook named Eustacius...
...Durrell's method had become a capricious, meretricious, and ill-concealed device for pumping in a kind of gallimaufric suspense and specious profundity...
...This is the story of a minor Peruvian revolutionary of the 1950s...
...The hallmark of this contemporary literature is that they are quite arbitrary...
...resignation from the Party...
...his alleged Reid Buckley most recently founded the Buckley School of Public Speaking, which organizes seminars for professional executives...
...Years ago I brashly panned Morning Noon and Night by the late (great) James Gould Cozzens for its self-destructive attitude toward reality, which, it seemed to me, had devastating potential for the novel form...
...The Washington Times "Mr...
...Justly...
...Morristown, NJ 07960 .,.t 7~ (201) 267-2515 •v...
...In structural dislocations, in extravagances, arbitrary contradictions of character or circumstance, and an addiction to what has become a very conventional literature of the absurd, the fundamentals of the novel are subverted...
...You can't trust the narrator, who may or may not "ambitious and non-ideological...the Guide's loudest bang will be that of the exploding egos of the 300 journalists who are rated from poor to the best...
...is (I think) Pacho, but who is in reality (but then, What is truth...
...They seem to be at-tempting to transcend the novel's connection to objective reality, in which at-tempt there is a kind of heroic, or hubristic, self-disdain at work scratching at the very mirrors of the imagination, until nothing remains, neither image nor its reflection...
...both are "about" adolescent sexuality...
...both Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...And for all the verbal extravagance of Low Tide, the character of Jezebel comes through in a vivid and touching way...
...If more work in economics follows in this direction, we will all benefit...
...But in Timc and Nunc, Mr...
...On principle, because I am devoted to the popular art form that the novel will cease to be if this arrogance continues...
...The obvious starting point for Low Tide is Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms...
...This cutting of the ground beneath fiction's feet has become a contemporary fetish...
...The central character's acedia in that novel, it seemed to me, dangerously surrenders the novelist's role as an interpreter of reality through the syncretizing and (with luck) epiphanous fires of the creative imagination...
...conjure up an incredibly claustrophobic atmosphere in a minimum of space...
...The narrator keeps returning to the same moments and events, squeezing his memory for detail...
...Does your understanding boggle just a bit...
...The novel is too serious a thing to be cavalier about...
...Their problematic courtship, in the course of which they shuttle between comfy watering holes on either side of the Atlantic, culminates in a frenzied, surrealistic trip through Mexico...
...its conventions are too critical to be cavalierly flouted...
...It comes as a bit of a shock to discover midway through this decidedly hermetic novel that Jem has ghostwritLOW TIDE Fernanda Eberstadt/Alfred A. Knopf/$13.95 ONE FOR THE MONEY Dick Belsky/Academy Chicago Publishers/$14.95 Terry Teachout 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...
...The interviews are not only in general dull...
...At the end, Mr...
...86 Maple Ave...
...Fiction will survive so long as storytelling survives...
...Anthony Burgess has succumbed terribly to this vice in his recent novels, the worst I've read being The End of the World News...
...one can as a writer and artist confabulate a counter creation, out of our human despair...
...I wanted to drink in her keen jeweled eyes, the slouchy, inhospitable projections of her figure: pelvis thrust forward, head back...
...An Asiatic monkey with Ivory Soap skin, and hair crimped in a chestnut wave...
...But there is a fatal step beyond Joyce that the writer dare not take for fear of the abyss...
...He [Mayta] was a revolutionary, one hundred percent, don't forget that...
...Lawrence Durrell succeeded with this technique wonderfully in his "Quartet," the four romances set in Alexandria...
...One would like to see Fernanda Eberstadt direct her attention to a less exotic subject matter next time around...
...both are written in a fragrant, adjective-laden species of prose in which everything is described from at least three or four different angles...
...tainable one...
...He turned to look at Mayta in such a way that I thought: Why does he hate me...
...There was some talk of his becoming a writer, a calling consonant with doing nothing and carrying about unread books...
...I demur, however...
...Wanniski's guide is great fun and his insights into the fourth estate make the MediaGuide a hard book to put down...
...I'm going to tell you what I think . . . I'm not surprised at what you have done, not about the plot, not about having secretly talked with that Stalinist policeman Blacquer...
...Lish...
...Because when existence and us poor pitiable human beings who are trapped in it are treated as a reductioad absurdum, with a kind of gallows humor in which the bitterness and resentment drive out compassion, then the reader is alienated...
...Miss Eberstadt alternates between ornate tropes and homely, aphoristic observations which suggest a cold eye and a keen sense of humor...
...Mario Vargas Llosa, was a childhood schoolmate of Alejandro Mayta, whose life story he is seeking to pin down...
...the ambiguities and ambivalences, instead of intriguing the reader, drive him out of patience because they are willful, capricious...
...That is, he, the narrator, at any given moment on the page may be speaking with an acquaintance of Mayta about some incident in the past, when, in the succeeding sentence, or even in mid sentence, he becomes Mayta speaking in the present to that acquaintance, or that acquaintance answering Mayta in the present instead of answering the narrator about what happened in the past...
...But even as he spoke, he knew inside that it wasn't going to be much use...
...he finally asks...
...You note the abrupt shift from a conversation in the present about the past between the narrator and the Stalinist to the voice, in the past (become without notice present), of a Trotskyite comrade of Mayta, turned enemy (Joaquin), whose voice the narrator (slipping into the past) suddenly assumes, himself becoming Mayta: "He turned to look at Mayta in such a way that I thought: Why does he hate me...
...This is the unfolding of the creative process of a novelist as perceived through the investigation by his alter ego (the narrator) of the many faces of historical reality and what's the use of it anyhow...
...They'd already decided, that's right, behind my back, to wash their hands of the insurrection, and no amount of talk was going to change their minds...
...As he spoke, he never revealed his pessimism...
...I read in the Wall Street Journal Raymond Sokolov complain about Gordon Lish's Peru (Lish is a literary guru), "[He] plays a very fancy game indeed...
...Perhaps he thought that would make us reconsider our refusal [to participate in Mayta's insurrection...
...Fortunately, not all of Low Tide is overwritten...
...I enjoyed John Fowles's The French Lieu-tenant's Woman until his double ending...
...which is what so many technically brilliant serious contemporary novelists are doing...
...I deplored Walker Percy's The Second Coming for cognate sufficient reasons...
...I've pretended as well that we were schoolmates, that we were the same age, and lifelong friends...
...Again: I'd recovered my self-control, and they actually did let me speak...
...Cozzens's narrator doubted the significance of anything that had ever happened to him equally as he doubted the material veracity of his, or anybody's, memory of everything...
...Marquez has not been able to build on...
...Well, no...
...The technique is obsessive...
...What sort of fiction is a 25-year-old conservative likely to write...
...But when its author is human, subject to the ontological paradox, that act can never be ex.nihilo, a process that first repudiates not only the existence of an objective reality but the possibility of there being an ascerFernanda Eberstadt, a young woman from New York who contributes shrewd and intelligent literary criticism to Commentary, has written a novel called Low Tide...
...He interviews Mayta's aunt, Mayta's Trotskyite associates, Mayta's friends, and Mayta's enemies—anyone and everyone who once knew the man...
...Vallejos, who suggests to Mayta the possibility of rising up against the government in the tippity-top Andean town of Jauja, his (alleged) homosexual relations with Anatolio, a young militant in the seven-member Revolutionary Workers' Party (T)—for Trotskyite—which has split from the plain (Stalinist) RWP...
...Pin down...
...Since Miss Eberstadt's periodical affiliations imply a political center of gravity appreciably right of center, one approaches her first novel with considerable interest...
...Where is the anchor of reality—in written works that have been influenced by the fat flies on the walls of Grillet and other of the French nouvelle vagueists...
...but this is, we know, false, because we are repeatedly reminded by the author-narrator that the novel is being written, coldly and methodically, not spontaneously poured out...
...But more and more of our leading novelists seem to bear a grudge against the form...
...The creative imagination is a paradigm of divine creativity...
...they are exasperating, because nothing in this process of discovery can truly be said to be verified...
...She sat so upright in a sheet of purple on the edge of a black vinyl chair, stroking my leg and transfixing me with that slurred growl, issuing from a wet, slightly tremulous pout...
...These interviews exhaustively dredge the few central dramatic salients of Mayta's life: his meeting and association with 2nd Lt...
...Why...
...Wrong again...
...Six pages later, Jem blows his brains out with a Luger...
...Still wrong...
...In Magus, Mr...
...They are moreover irritating because the voices of Mayta and other characters keep breaking through the narrative, as though (possibly in fact) the subconscious of the narrator is in the act of composing the fiction that he seeks to spin off the problematical history of his unimportant subject...
...He applies his theory to an understanding of how capitalism works and to issues of public policy such as taxation and government regulation...
...his alleged betrayal of his Party...
...The obsessiveness of the technique quickly nags nerve-ends...
...Maybe now we would take his plan seriously.,, "As a matter of fact, we would have expelled him a long time ago," affirms Comrade Joaquin...
...Miss Eberstadt's answer to this intriguing question is something of a surprise: Low Tide turns out to be a symbolic novella about the emotional and sexual rites of passage of a pair of wealthy adolescents...
...Let me illustrate...
...Disgust twists his face . . . "But why...
...That, it seemed to me, was a development from earlier reversals of circumstance and character in his The Magus with less virtue than vice: He could not decide which ending to settle on, so he pushed that chore off on the reader, which is sweet and kind, but which is also abandoning the writer's job...
...He raises his head as if he's been stung by a wasp...
...THE REAL LIFE OF ALEJANDRO MAYTA Mario Vargas Llosa/Farrar Straus Giroux/$16.95 Reid Buckley The beguiling Peruvian author, Mario Vargas, conspires in this work with a host of his contemporaries in dealing fiction death blows...
...Failure to recognize the creative character of entrepreneurship, he holds, has led many to limit their vision of the future to today's expectations rather than to grasp the possibilities of the unknowable discoveries of tomorrow...
...Of course . . . everyone will think it's pure fantasy...
...Mayta, whom he finally interviews in person: Naturally your real name never appears even once...
...I forcefully repeated all the reasons I'd already given them .. . There is a factitious excitement to this, as one is apparently being permitted into the intimate process of creation itself...
...One may oppose, or deplore, or lament, or rage at the given reality in which we human beings travail, whose ultimate truths forever recede from us, tantalizing us, mocking us...
...which is, in my opinion, their calamitous strategic error...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
