What sort of a critic and essayist is the extraordinarily versatile novelist Mario Vargas Llosa? First in this generous selection of his recent writing comes literature. It is not for the most part erudite criticism, though he can certainly turn his hand to that, as his recent study of Les Misérables has shown. Many of the pieces here are short articles, simple and direct, some from the Spanish daily El País. Risks are certainly run in offering them in translation to a different readership, but his qualities overcome them. Vargas Llosa is an enthusiast, with an uncommon faculty for not stinting praise. He is without pretence or pretension: most writers with a childhood spent in Cochabamba would I imagine nowadays take some care to exploit, or at least preserve, the more exotic aspects of the place, and not confess as he does to happy days spent reading Richmal Crompton’s Just William. He is loyal to the now unfashionable — to The Old Man and the Sea, to Faulkner, to Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer. (Here occurs the one error I can find in John King’s excellent translations, ‘eschatological’ obsession for ‘scatological’ obsession; few books have been less concerned with the ‘four last things’ than that one.) Conrad, Mann, Virginia Woolf, Breton, Malraux, Karen Blixen, Camus, Nabokov, Grass, Arguedas and Neruda are all given a good shot of intelligent generosity. He tells what the experience of reading these authors was for him, ‘a flagrant literary parasite’, and analyses why he still admires them. He is not without humour, and is particularly persuasive about the attractions of Malraux’s Les chênes qu’on abat: ‘this dialogue between two monuments, who speak as only people in great books speak, with unremitting coherence and brilliance, broke down my defences, engrossed me in its delirious egotism, and made me believe, as I read, the prophetic nonsense with which these two brilliant interlocutors consoled themselves . . . It seduced me, not convinced me, and now I try to explain it by saying that Felled Oaks is a magnificent, detestable book.’ Read him on Breton or Virginia Woolf, and you will want to turn, or turn again, to Nadja and Mrs Dalloway.
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