El pez en el agua (Spanish Edition)

Originally published in 1993,Vargas Llosa's political memoir is resplendent with yellow sand; gray city fences; the flushed, packed faces of radicals; beautiful women, indigenous peoples; and, of course, books—many books. Interchanging chapters lead us through two resurgences in Vargas Llosa's free inquiry: the ebullient voyage toward becoming a writer during his twenties and the return to his calling after a taxing (unsuccessful) presidential campaign during his sixties. Vargas Llosa portrays a 1953 Peru saddled with an oppressing dictatorship, as the background for his coming of age politically. He attended secret rendezvous of Communist circles and organized illicit publications criticizing the dictatorship. Later, the politically mature writer is preternaturally preoccupied with a country he sees slipping further into poverty and ignorance and decides to fight for the privatization of the economy. Far from the intellectual, creative politics he loved to think about in his youth, the politics he encountered in 1990 was filled with "intrigues, artifice, conspiracies, pacts, paranoia, treasons, many calculations, no insignificant amount of cynicism, and all kinds of jugglery." In the chapters detailing his presidential candidacy, the narrative bends toward discourse, with rare moments of examination—self or otherwise. Vargas Llosa's prose is more astute in the passages where he is an underdog—from the luminous recollections of his youth, to the gritty, torrential experiences he recounts as a journalist. Readers of Vargas Llosa curious about his inspiration and startling life-story take note: this book will augment any Latin American studies or literature collection. Highly recommended.—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Palo Alto, CA