The Guardian Reviews Harsh Times by Mario Vargas Llosa

I never read Mario Vargas Llosa before prison.  There I read two novels and s book of essays on writing. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is a writer worth reading. Now he he has published a new novel and here are some excerpts from the the Guardian's review:

This is the kind of novel that mocks the give-it-10-pages, I-need-to-be-grabbed-because-life-is-too-short school of reading. Even those of the trust-the-artist, persevere-and-stand-fast persuasion should prepare to be tested. I confess: I was confused, bewildered, lost. I wrote down the names of the characters. I backtracked. I cross-tracked. I re-tracked. The shape of the narrative only really began to declare itself around page 90. But then … oh, what an engaging education Harsh Times turned out to be, and how I came to look forward to my time in its company.

***

 A substantial part of Vargas Llosa’s gift has always been to illuminate the interior lives of characters regardless of their moral position – something only the greatest writers can do. Everyone in this book is mired in consequential life-and-death decisions. We fear for Marta Borrero, Armas’s lover, when she flees Guatemala in terror in the back of a car driven by the monster, Gacel. We cheer for her when she sinks her teeth into the ear of the degenerate Héctor Trujillo. Somehow, we care about Colonel Enrique, the vile head of Armas’s security, as he crawls back from the rag-and-bone degradation of five years in variously savage prisons infested with “perverts”.

***

 ...Sure, this novel isn’t Vargas Llosa’s finest (although I can’t think of many rival eightysomething authors who could do better). But it is replete with his deep human sensibility; it swarms with life and a determination to tunnel down into the underlying truth of humanity. Power. Politics. Credos and dogma. Senseless, casual death. Hopeless, casual love. The perpetual cruelty that greed recycles. The intergenerational legacy of stupidity. The way humansscontinually end up running things to their own detriment. Our own detriment.

So why not read it? I will. There will be something to learn from Llosa.

sch