Volume 48, Number 19 · November 29, 2001
When the Era Was an Era
By Alastair Reid
The Feast of the Goat
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 404 pp., $25.00
A new book by Mario Vargas Llosa always provokes attention, for there are few novelists alive as dedicated as he is to the possibilities of fiction, in all its moods, modes, and manners. His writing life has been not just steadily productive but constantly inventive. His novels are so skillfully put together that they are worth reading simply as literary constructs, yet he has remained immersed in his own realities, a writer who wrestles constantly with Latin American contradictions and ambiguities. He first attracted attention in Spain in 1962, with the publication of his novel The Time of the Hero, the book that is often credited with bringing the Latin American novelists of his generation to the world's attention. As a perpetual dissenter, he has a grave respect for the responsibility of the writer.
Review, 3434 words
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