Peruvian Voice
Llosa, Mario Vargas
Peruvian Voice THE REAL LIFE OF ALEJANDRO MAYTA by Mario Vargas Llosa Farrar Straus and Giroux. 310 pp. $16.95. Nothing has been more characteristic of the critical interests of our time than...
...Nothing has been more characteristic of the critical interests of our time than the speculation by writers and critics about the relationships between history and fiction...
...And so everything in the book is thrown into question, even the description of current activities...
...But if Vargas is not responding to fashionable theories of literary criticism that insistently proclaim the total inefficacy of language, then he may simply be revealing the strain that afflicts a sensitive observer of conditions in his part of the world where there seem to be few alternatives to violence and hunger...
...We learn nothing about the real Mayta or his ideas and motivations...
...The best he can hope for is to "know what I'm lying about...
...Vargas emphasizes his main theme, for despite all the efforts of the narrator he cannot find any unequivocal information about Mayta, only a "web of suppositions and hypotheses...
...As Harold Clurman once noted, artists always give us lies like truth...
...Then, about halfway through the book, Vargas's approach changes...
...It is not so much the notion that fiction lies which is disturbing...
...We are left with a comedic climax in which Mayta and eight students join the officer in a ridiculous attempt to capture a provincial police station, an act that Mayta expects to trigger the revolution...
...He became a Trotskyist, one of a tiny splinter group which barely had the power to control its own small cadre...
...A character speaks, and without transition we shift from the present to a scene with Mayta twenty-five years earlier...
...Given our own complicity in the situation, it's hard to fault him...
...Moreover, the country is apparently being invaded by a joint force of Cubans, Bolivians, and Soviets...
...That last sentence exposes the nature of the translation, which is too often trite and awkwardly composed...
...The first part of the book traces Mayta's background and early career...
...Contrary to earlier statements, that may not be the case...
...Mayta is accused of being a spy for the Stalinists, an agent of the CIA, and a homosexual...
...The plot seems to center on the attempt of a writer (whose name we never learn) to track down the history of his schoolmate who has been involved in an outrageously silly insurrection...
...Talking about his book Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow noted that he wanted it to be somewhere between history and fiction—we might call it an exercise in "fictory" or "hiction...
...In this context, he states the credo of the writer: "One thing you learn when you try to reconstruct an event from eyewitness accounts," the narrator says, "is that each version is just someone's story, and that all stories mix truth and lies...
...The conditions are ripe for revolution and have been for many years, and it seems that Mayta was destined to be the leader of a revolutionary movement, for even as a child he went on a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions of the poor...
...As the narrator takes his morning jog, he notes that the city, Lima, has turned into a garbage dump: "The spectacle of misery was once limited exclusively to the slums, then it spread downtown, and now it is the common property of the whole city, even the exclusive residential neighborhoods...
...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches American Studies at California State University, Fresno...
...The setting is Peru, twenty-five years after the event...
...Throughout this there is only a vague suggestion of what the actual uprising was about, or its outcome...
...Every comment is suspect, including May-ta's dream that his will be a real revolution in which "social, moral, and sexual prejudices would give way little by little, and it wouldn't matter to anyone, in that crucible of work and faith that Peru would be in the future, that he would be living with Anatolis...
...Is Peru really being invaded by Cubans...
...But Vargas's is an important voice among South American writers, and it is worth pondering the implications of his work...
...The narrator interviews a wide range of people who knew Mayta or who were drawn into the insurrectionary program initiated by a hot-headed, attractive, and politically unsophisticated officer in a provincial outpost...
...It is not a terribly exciting or impressive story up to this point, although Vargas uses an interesting Faulknerian technique of changing time sequences without formal acknowledgment...
...And even though the long prose works we usually call novels originated in a framework that encouraged us to believe they were essentially fictionalized treatments of real events and actual people, contemporary fiction writers have very different intentions...
...Predictably, they fail, and most of them are executed...
...As the narrator observes the poverty and fascist terror around him, he summarizes the meaning of his country: "Violence behind me and hunger in front of me...
...This is clearly the case in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta...
...All fictions, he insists, are lies and, as he explains to Mayta when they finally meet, "In a novel there are always more lies than truths, a novel is never a faithful account of events...
Vol. 50 • July 1986 • No. 7
