Mario Vargas Llosa’s imagined lives.

Restless Realism

By Thomas Mallon - The New Yorker

Vargas Llosa has a zookeeper’s tenderness for the human “fauna” he describes in his fiction. Credit Illustration by Patrick Bremer

In the course of Mario Vargas Llosa’s seventy-nine years, Peru has alternated between dictatorship and democracy with the sort of regularity that other countries experience through mere shiftings from one political party to another. During his nation’s most violent and despairing periods, Vargas Llosa must keenly have felt the truth of his own repeated assertion that the writer of fiction wishes to replace the world as it is with another one entirely.

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