Making Waves

Mario Vargas Llosa's lively mind alights in all kinds of places, both expected and unexpected: at the 1982 World Cup in Spain; on the Cuban revolution; in Berlin, where the son he meets at the airport has become a Rastafarian. But winding through this engaging collection is an exploration of something closer to the Peruvian novelist's (and one-time presidential contender's) core: his thoughts on the politics of literature and the literature of politics. In the United States, novelists aren't thought of in terms of their contribution to the national good; For Llosa, as for many Latin American writers, these acts most public (politics) and private (the writing of literature) are inextricably linked. "A writer," he says, "has no better way of serving his country than by writing with as much discipline and honesty as he can.... If he writes better in his country, he must stay there; if he writes better in exile, he must leave." And for those who think fiction is divorced from real life, think again: "A nation," writes Llosa, "is a political fiction imposed on a social and geographic reality almost always by force, for the benefit of a political minority." Spanning thirty years of writing, these essays trace the development of Mario Vargas Llosa's thinking on politics and culture, and show the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path, and the presidency of Alberto Fujimoro; brilliant engagements with such towering figures of twentieth-century literature as Joyce, Faulkner, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Bellows; considerations on the dog cemetery where Rin-Tin-Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt's knife, and the failures of the English public-school system, which made Vargas Llosa's son into a Rastafarian. This collection reminds us "that literature is fire, that it means nonconformity and rebellion. . . [that it] is a form of permanent insurrection." Making Waves superbly exemplifies Vargas Llosa's artistic credo.