Despair hangs over this somber novel, a desolation as omnipresent as the garbage dumped on the streets of the author's native Lima. The setting is Peru in the near future, a military dictatorship besieged by Cuban-backed rebels and defended by U.S. Marines. An unnamed writer interviews people who were involved with his former classmate, Mayta, an idealistic radical whose journey through the various sects of the Peruvian left eventually led to his participation in a pathetic, doomed uprising in 1958. The writer seeks to understand what prompted Mayta to make this futile gesture, but finds only a tangle of disputed facts and self-serving statements; Mayta, he is told, was a homosexual, a police informant, even a thief. What is the truth? "Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in illusions . . . Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary." Readers acquainted with the author's previous work will recognize this as a central theme in all his writing, but not even in The War of the End of the World was it stated so flatly, so bleakly. The sourness and hopelessness of Vargas Llosa's vision are sadly appropriate to the terrible situation in Latin America today, but they give the novel a mean tone that's difficult to appreciate. Mayta is a book one can admire and respect without really liking it very much. U.K. rights: Faber & Faber; translation rights: Carmen Balcells. January
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Like his highly praised The War of the End of the World ( LJ 9/1/84), Vargas Llosa's new novel is based on a historical incident and points to the futility of fanaticism in politics. The narrator is a novelist investigating the life of Mayta, who participated in a fiasco of a rebellion 30 years before. To those he interviews the narrator readily admits his intention to write a novel, and the novel he writes is a skillful blend of events and his investigations into them. When asked why he goes to so much trouble digging up the past, he answers, "Because I'm a realist, in my novels I always try to lie knowing why I do it." The real fascination in this novel is that it is the story of its own creation. L.M. Lewis, Social Science Dept., Eastern Kentucky Univ., Richmond
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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