Letters to a Young Novelist

New York Times Book Review

[Mario Vargas Llosa] an ambition worthy of such masters of the nineteenth-century novel as Balzac, Dickens and Galdos, but with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James.

New Yorker

My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you've read in my letters about the structure of the novel -- just sit down and write." The final sentence of the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Letters to a Young Novelist, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), may undercut the careful tutorial it concludes, but it's probably his soundest advice. As didactic as Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" -- "Have you read ' Jealousy ' by Alain Robbe-Grillet?" "And, speaking of Joyce, wasn't 'Ulysses' a cataclysmic innovation?" -- Vargas Llosa's book takes the form of a one-sided correspondence with an imaginary fan. Defining the fiction writer as a rebel, a " 'dissident' from reality," Vargas Llosa lectures on persuasiveness and the "aura of indispensability" present in the language of a true writer.

That aura clings to nearly every phrase of Rilke's Letters on Cezanne (a new edition is forthcoming from North Point), which he wrote to his wife in 1907 while living in Paris and waiting for the proofs of "New Poems" to appear. Two rooms devoted to Cézanne at the Autumn Salon mesmerized him -- the still-lifes in particular, which he found "wonderfully occupied with themselves." The painter's "objectivity" resonated with Rilke's emerging interest in the Ding-Gedicht, or "thing poem." One canvas showed a red armchair whose "round bulging back curves and slopes forward and down to the armrests (which are sewn up like the sleeve stump of an armless man)." Cézanne's colors -- "chrome yellow" and "burning lacquer red -- could, he wrote, "heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you." (Dana Goodyear)

Suzanne Jill Levine

[Llosa's] ambition worthy of . . . masters . . . with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Now based in London and teaching at Georgetown University in the U.S., Peruvian novelist and erstwhile politician Vargas Llosa's novels (In Praise of the Stepmother, etc.) and essays (Making Waves). Though the "Letters to a Young " concept has recently been franchised by another publisher (applying it to everything from golf to rabble-rousing), Rilke's slender and sage Letters to a Young Poet remains the standard after 100 years. Vargas Llosa's 12 Letters to a generalized interlocutor drift in and out of Rilke's league, rich with insight into Western literature and with commentary on the urge that overtakes its practitioners "The literary vocation is not a hobby, a sport, or a pleasant leisure-time activity. It is an all-encompassing, all-excluding occupation, an urgent priority, a freely chosen servitude that turns its victims (its lucky victims) into slaves." Yet Vargas Llosa is also somewhat wryly withholding, as if to thicken the plot: "Writing novels is the equivalent of what professional strippers do when they take off their clothes and exhibit their naked bodies on stage. The novelist performs the same acts in reverse." His examples of good and great novelists, whom he discusses while making larger philosophical points about concepts like style, time or representation, are pretty hard to take issue with: Woolf and James; Dos Passos and Hemingway; Flaubert (Madame Bovary is a particular favorite), de Beauvoir and Robbe-Grillet; Borges and Cervantes. Neither a survey course in what to read nor a practical guide to writing, the book finally is a meditation on writing and its proper relationship to life. "Good novels, great ones, never actually seem to tell us anything; rather, they make us live it, and share in it, by virtue of their persuasive powers." Particularly given the excellent translation here by PW contributing editor Wimmer, the same could be said for letters like these. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In 11 vibrant and elegantly argued, essay-long letters, one of the great modern novelists offers advice on the craft of writing. Vargas Llosa, the author of such masterpieces as The Storyteller and In Praise of the Stepmother, here turns his sharp mind to the building blocks of persuasive prose. By drawing on a range of books as varied as the French nouveau roman, German modernist works, medieval romances, American Gothic novels, and the giants of contemporary Latin American fiction, Vargas Llosa offers an entirely absorbing reflection on the nature of literature and on the endeavor of writing fiction, which he calls "a lie covering up a deep truth." When he draws on other works to reveal some tricks of the writer's trade, he breathes new life into the classics; his consistently brilliant observations constitute critical revelations in their own right. Nothing short of a primer for aspiring novelists, this book deserves a place next to Rilke's timeless Letters to a Young Poet. If read attentively, it just might save some readers the tuition for a master's degree in creative writing. Recommended for all public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/02.] Ulrich Baer, NYU Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Sharp insights abound in this gathering of 11 closely related essays on fictional technique and the attitudes underlying it, by the eminent Peruvian-born author of such contemporary classics as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982) and The Feast of the Goat (2001). This is ostensibly a series of letters to a fledgling novelist (about whom we learn precisely nothing), who's doubtless a fictional device himself. Vargas Llosa amiably pours forth, nevertheless, the wisdom accumulated during a lifetime of writing, reading, and thinking about the impulse toward literary creation (". . . a deep dissatisfaction with real life . . ."), the roots of fiction in each writer's own life and opinions, and specific problems of creating and balancing form and content, as solved by such masters as Flaubert, Melville, Faulkner, and fellow Latin Americans Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Alejo Carpentier. The finest chapters are those in which Vargas Llosa addresses specific technical issues by analyzing relevant classic texts: e.g., the differences between chronological and psychological time as expressed in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Joyce's Ulysses, and Mexican Augusto Monterroso's hilarious single-sentence masterpiece, "The Dinosaur"; relationships between the real and the fantastic in James's The Turn of the Screw and Woolf's Orlando; and "Chinese box" construction" as perfected in The Thousand and One Nights and Don Quixote. If he actually exists, Vargas Llosa's "young novelist" is fortunate indeed to profit from such lightly worn learning. If he doesn't, the rest of us can be grateful for this relaxed tour through the provinces of the fiction-maker's imagination. Andthe general reader will be happy to be pointed toward such comparatively little-known watershed works as João Guimarães Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Juan Carlos Onetti's A Brief Life, and the enchanting medieval epic Tirant lo Blanc. A fine addition to an important body of work that looks more and more Nobel-worthy as the years pass.

From the Publisher

“A fascinating commentary...distills [great works] brilliantly, revealing an architecture to their greatness.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Ought to be dubbed the world’s cheapest MFA...Not just a book for writers, but one for readers, too...And for those who want to do more than read, [it] will instruct, illuminate, and most important, inspire.” —St. Petersburg Times

“[This book] will make you, if not a novelist, at least a subtler taster of novels.” —San Antonio Express

“Less a collection of dictums on the craft of the novel than a tribute to its formal complexities and potential through his admiring comments on works by the likes of Flaubert and Cervantes.” —The New York Times Book Review