Volume 26, Number 21 & 22 · January 24, 1980
The Claims of Mischief
By Michael Wood
The Buenos Aires Affair
by Manuel Puig, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
Dutton, 219 pp., $8.95
Kiss of the Spider Woman
by Manuel Puig, translated by Thomas Colchie
Knopf, 281 pp., $8.95
In Evil Hour
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Harper & Row, 183 pp., $8.95
The Cubs and Other Stories
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Gregory Kolovakos, by Ronald Christ
Harper & Row, 139 pp., $10.00
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Gregory Kolovakos, by Ronald Christ
Harper & Row, 244 pp., $10.95
'Every novel,' Mario Vargas Llosa wrote some years ago, 'is a symbolic assassination of reality.' Many novelists have thought just the reverse, of course, and many readers feel that reality itself, or at least a plausible imitation of it, is the assassin of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. But the remark has its own excited, embattled force. Cornered by history and politics, trapped in a situation that seems both hopeless and inescapable, the writer asserts the magical properties of his art. The liberation of long-blocked fantasy was certainly a conspicuous element in the surge of new fiction in Latin America which is now called the Boom. One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in Spanish in 1967, is a landmark in this as in other respects, and Vargas Llosa's remark appears in his patient and generous and lengthy study of García Márquez.[1] Myth, which for T.S. Eliot was a way of 'making the modern world possible for art,' was for many Latin American writers a means of refusing the world's sad possibilities, a promise of endurance, a cheerful sign that even the worst constrictions of the spirit could be weathered.
Review, 4795 words
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