Making Waves: Essays

Spanning thirty years of writing, Making Waves traces the development of the Nobel Prize–winning author Mario Vargas Llosa’s thinking on politics and culture, and shows the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, and the terrorism of Peru’s Shining Path; brilliant engagements with towering figures of literature such as Joyce, Faulkner, and Sartre; and observations about the dog cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt’s knife, and the failures of the English public-school system.

"Translations of 46 short articles comprising a collection of Vargas Llosa's writings from early 1960s-93, chosen for their diversity of topics. Presented in chronological order with some grouped thematically; political and literary development stressed. Locating foreword, index. Excellent translations. Compelling selection, with most recent pieces from Desafâios a la libertad (see HLAS 56:3742)"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Mario Vargas Llosa, renowned as a novelist, is one of our most brilliant and provocative public intellectuals as well. In Making Waves, the first collection of his essays, he explores, with characteristic brio and elegance, his long-standing preoccupations - literature and politics, Europe and the Americas, and the relations among them all. We follow Vargas Llosa from his native Peru to Madrid and then to Paris, the setting of essays on his great precursors Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, as well as a comic account of his visit to the tomb of Rin Tin Tin and an affecting memoir of his time in the city as an aspiring writer in the 1960s. In passionately critical essays on the Cuban revolution and its aftermath, Vargas Llosa takes up vital questions of Latin American independence, while in essays on Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar - and in an exchange with Gunter Grass - he ponders magic realism. In more recent articles, he considers the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path and the presidency of Alberto Fujimori - and the failures of the English public-school system, which made his son into a Rastafarian. The essays in Making Waves are full of Mario Vargas Llosa's unflagging literary intensity and moral and political integrity. They are an important addition to the body of work of this major international writer.

Publishers Weekly

This varied collection of essays, written over three decades and appearing in publications worldwide, traces the development of Vargas Llosa's thinking on government, society and culture. An expatriate, he regards his native Peru with "a hatred steeped in tenderness," and the piece titled "Literature and Exile" is a moving apologia for his residence in Europe, where he has spent most of his adult life. (He took up dual Spanish and Peruvian nationality in the early 1990s after his unsuccessful bid for the presidency of Peru.) Vargas Llosa's luminous essays on literature embody a heroic view of writers as lonely rebels struggling against indifference and contempt; "Literature Is Fire" is a feisty manifesto proclaiming that "the raison d'tre of a writer is protest, disagreement and criticism." The pieces reveal a youthful and exuberantly idealistic Marxist slowly yielding, as if inexorably, to a radical liberalism born of a disillusionment with revolutionary politics. Ultimately, in "A Fleeting Impression of Vaclav Havel," Vargas Llosa is inspired by the steadfastness of his fellow writer turned politician, who was never a Marxist and was therefore less susceptible to depression despite years in prison: "Havel proves that one can always do something." Ever tantalized by an insatiable hunger for beauty and justice, Vargas Llosa is a writer of great integrity and humor, and this new volume will be treasured by those who relish the brilliance and clarity of his prose.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936. In 1958 he earned a scholarship to study in Madrid, and later he lived in Paris. His first story collection, The Cubs and Other Stories, was published in 1959. Vargas Llosa's reputation grew with the publication in 1963 of The Time of the Hero, a controversial novel about the politics of his country. The Peruvian military burned a thousand copies of the book. He continued to live abroad until 1980, returning to Lima just before the restoration of democratic rule.

A man of politics as well as literature, Vargas Llosa served as president of PEN International from 1977 to 1979, and headed the government commission to investigate the massacre of eight journalists in the Peruvian Andes in 1983.

Vargas Llosa has produced critical studies of García Márquez, Flaubert, Sartre, and Camus, and has written extensively on the roots of contemporary fiction. For his own work, he has received virtually every important international literary award. Vargas Llosa's works include The Green House (1968) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1975), about which Suzanne Jill Levine for The New York Times Book Review said: "With an ambition worthy of such masters of the 19th-century novel as Balzac, Dickens and Galdós, but with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James . . . Mario Vargas Llosa has [created] one of the largest narrative efforts in contemporary Latin American letters." In 1982, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter to broad critical acclaim. In 1984, FSG published the bestselling The War of the End of the World, winner of the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta was published in 1986. The Perpetual Orgy, Vargas Llosa's study of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, appeared in the winter of 1986, and a mystery, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, the year after. The Storyteller, a novel, was published to great acclaim in 1989. In 1990, FSG published In Praise of the Stepmother, also a bestseller. Of that novel, Dan Cryer wrote: "Mario Vargas Llosa is a writer of promethean authority, making outstanding fiction in whatever direction he turns" (Newsday).

In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of his native Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society. In 1996, Death in the Andes, Vargas Llosa's next novel, was published to wide acclaim. Making Waves, a collection of his literary and political essays, was published in 1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, a novel, was published in 1998; The Feast of the Goat, which sold more than 400,000 copies in Spanish-language, was published in English in 2001; The Language of Passion, his most recent collection of nonfiction essays on politics and culture, was published by FSG in June 2003. The Way to Paradise, a novel, was published in November 2003; The Bad Girl, a novel, was published in the U.S. by FSG in October, 2007. His most recent novel, El Sueño del Celta, will be published in 2011 or 2012. Two works of nonfiction are planned for the near future as well.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".