The Vargas Llosa Chair at PUCP asked me what my favorite Vargas Llosa book is, and this is my answer: There are at least twelve novels by Mario Vargas Llosa and several books of essays that I consider essential reading—many of my favorite novels are by him: The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, for example—so, in order not to revisit any of the most universally admired texts, I am going to focus on one of my most unlikely favorites, one that is often overlooked: The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.
That novel, published in the Orwellian year of 1984, seems, like 1984, a book from the future. It is autofictional in a way that is infinitely more interesting than any autofiction today, and it is so meta-referential that it would have left Fredric Jameson—an admirer, incidentally, of The Aunt Julia—speechless. The Real Life of Michael Mayta not only reproduces to the point of absurdity the image of its author at the very moment of writing the book, but also proposes an “other self” of Vargas Llosa who deliberately blurs the boundaries between chronicle and fiction, questions the legitimacy of distorting reality in fiction, and contrasts the figure of the historian who works with precarious information—how to historiate the undocumented?— with that of the novelist who revels in this precariousness —how can one not novelize the undocumented?— because he can supplement it with imagination.
The last chapter of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, when the narrative suddenly reveals itself to be artifice and yet, at the same time, reveals itself to be more real, more pathetic, more personal, more tragic, and more monstrously human, must be the most surprising and intellectually original fictional ending in the history of the Peruvian novel. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, written immediately after his great total novel, The War of the End of the World, is already a sharp dismantling of the mechanism of the total novel, and the first example of the debate novel that Vargas Llosa would refine in later books such as El hablador, La fiesta del chivo, and Tiempos recios: the novel that does not avoid the thesis, but multiplies it, contrasting two or three or four theories of reality and taking a step back to wait for the reader to decipher or abandon them all, as if the author were suddenly no longer a Flaubert or a Henry James, but many.
