Grand Ambition

...That voice is sometimes hilarious, sometimes deeply affecting...

...He is not merely consumed with the need to tell stories...

...He passionately wishes that modern authors could be as central to their culture as the habladores are to theirs...

...Ultimately, the problem here is that the fiction expressing these aspirations is less engaging than the aspirations themselves...

...In fact, no one had ever heard from him...

...Reviewed by Alan Wade Free-lance writer Mawo Vargas Llosa's latest novel is an extended speculation on the art, and mystery, of telling stories...

...Saul, for example, could have been a wonderful character...

...Then, one day, while revisiting the Machiguengas for a television show he was producing called The Tower of Babel—a sort of Peruvian 60 Minutes— he was told about an hablador with a purplish birthmark, red hair and pale skin...

...The narrator is sure they are listening to a legendary storyteller...

...Nevertheless, for all his efforts, he could not render the habladores in fiction...

...The idea of a man who identifies so deeply with another culture that he becomes the preserver of its traditions is as irresistible as the narrator keeps saying...

...So it is too bad that after a short chapter Saul disappears, except as the voice of the Machiguenga myth...

...Whatever the outcome of Vargas Llosa's campaign, one hopes the experience will provide this writer—whose brilliant previous novels have made him a kind of Latin American Balzac—with the material to compose a richer story next time around...

...An implicit parallel is made between the wandering Machiguengas and the Jewish people, too, as Saul inserts personages—real and fictional—from his previous "tribe" into the narrative...

...Then one day the sun started to fall and Tasurinchi, the god of good, told the people to start walking to keep the sun from falling more: "'The day you stop walking, you will disappear completely...

...Toward the end we begin to recognize the details of Saul's own story and realize that he is the one speaking—he has indeed become an hablador...

...Mascarita(MaskFace), as he was called, was the "ugliest lad in the world...

...Given the author's current political ambitions —he is Peru's leading presidential candidate—the tale also has something of a valedictory air...

...he had simply vanished...

...The lack of suspense and the narrator's endless first-person ruminations on the nature and importance of his craft frequently give The Storyteller the feel of an essay more than a novel as well...

...Standing in the gallery, the narrator remembers that the friend, a half-Jewish ethnology student named Saul Zuratas, was remarkable for his bright red hair and a disfiguring birthmark, "the color of wine dregs, " covering the right side of his face...

...The women bore pure children...

...Dragging the sun down with you.'" The myth goes on to relate the struggles of Tasurinchi with Kientibakori, the god of evil, and traces the affairs of men, animals and gods through history...

...And the more he stares at the picture, the more convinced he is that the man in the center is his old friend, Saul...

...He was defeated by "the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story...

...Because The Storyteller is really an elaborate protest against what Vargas Llosa perceives as the novelist's marginality, the book takes on an extra dimension in the light of his well-publicized career change...

...The pictures remind him not only of his own passion but of a college friend, whose attraction to the Machiguengas was even more intense...

...The one topic that could almost rouse him to anger was the rapid encroachment of modern society into the hidden jungle world, where a few tribes still lived nearly untouched by Western civilization...

...It depicts an Indian tribe the narrator has been interested in (which really exists) since his university days: the Machiguengas, or the "walkers," nomads who wander through the dense rain forests of Peru in small groups...

...The unnamed narrator, a Peruvian writer spending a couple of solitary summer months in Florence, happens upon a small gallery exhibition of photographs entitled, "Natives of the Amazon Forest...

...The chapters recalling the narrator's formative years and subsequent writing career are interspersed with the fairskinned Machiguenga storyteller's epic recounting of the tribe's history...

...he was also irrepressibly kind and likable...

...The story seems to be the author's way of solving the narrator's problem of " how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story"—but the result reads like a talented Western writer trying to produce a folk tale...

...Meanwhile the narrator (a writer unmistakably like Vargas Llosa) had tried without success to capture the Machiguenga habladores (storytellers) on the printed page...

...Upon returning from the forest to Lima, he learned that Saul had not gone to Israel...

...They're tangible proof," the narrator tells us, "that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment__Something primordial, something the very existence of a people may depend on...

...After the two finished their studies they lost touch...

...Unfortunately, the reader guesses he is Saul fairly early and this contributes to a certain matter-of-factness about the book...

...The novel is meant to be read as a gradually unfolding mystery, with the true identity of the hablador in the photograph withheld until the last pages...

...It suggests his bid for Peru's presidency is the author's way of saying that if a writer cannot play the role of an hablador in his society, maybe a writer/president can...

...Now, at the exhibition in Florence, the narrator finds himself drawn repeatedly to one photograph that shows a circle of Indians sitting rapt around a figure with fair skin...

...Hebegins with an Edenic account of the creation of the world: "The sun, their eye of the sky, was fixed...there was no evil, there was no wind, there was no rain...

...Elusive figures about whom the Indians refuse to talk, they travel from clan to clan relating the tribe's genealogy, history, traditions, and latestnews...

...At the same time, he is keenly aware that in his historical moment this is impossible...

...The tangle of gods and spirits and animals populating its saga, however, becomes no less confusing, or forgettable, than the crowded casts of most folk epics...

...Some thought Saul had emigrated to Israel with his aged father...