Volume 41, Number 10 · May 26, 1994
The Bitter Education of Vargas Llosa
By Alma Guillermoprieto
A Fish in the Water: A Memoir
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen Lane
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 532 pp., $25.00
Mario Vargas Llosa belongs to a long tradition of the politically engaged Latin American intellectual. In the absence of a professional and competent political class, and in the face of an abundance of vile regimes, people with an education and no stake in the system—the kind of people who used to become journalists in the United States—have stepped in to fill a moral and ideological void. Often they too, like Vargas Llosa, have started out as journalists and ended up as fiction writers or poets. Often they have achieved professional acclaim and moral recognition. A great many have courted, and met, death courageously. But few would have been willing to risk extreme ridicule, as Vargas Llosa gamely did in his most recent political adventure. Apart from Václav Havel, no other writer in recent memory has taken his ambition as high as the presidency. And in a part of the world where a leftist revolutionary position is synonymous with intellectual honor, certainly none but the Peruvian Vargas Llosa would have tried to save his country by running for—and almost winning—the presidency of his country as the candidate of the right.
Review, 7573 words
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