El pez en el agua.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Evil tongues have it Vargas Llosa never really wanted to be president of Peru; what he wanted, they say, was to write a book about the experience of running for office. Be that as it may, El pez en el agua, Vargas Llosa's account of his 1990 presidential bid, is both fascinating and irritating - fascinating, because it provides an insider's view of the complexities of Peru's political system; irritating, because of the author's tendency to blame the failures of his campaign on others. The chapters on the preparations for the election alternate with Vargas Llosa's autobiography, which describes his political and literary awakenings and provides insight into the circumstances that led him to become a moderate, procapitalist, champion of the middle classes.

A unifying thread is Vargas Llosa's frustration not only with Peruvian politics, but with Peruvian society. He begins by describing his father's resentment of his mother's family, which he sees as symptomatic of the kind of rancors that permeate Peru. These, he explains, make Peruvians the easy prey of leftist agitators and military dictators, who play on diverse groups' suspicions of one another.

His purpose in heading Movimiento Libertad, or Freedom Movement, he claims, was to advance the cause of Peruvian democracy by running a campaign of ideas. For Vargas Llosa, political and economic freedom are inseparable, but for the people, used to demagogues who play on their social resentments, it was "strange that a political organization should speak ... in favor of the marketplace, defending capitalism as more efficient and fair than socialism and as the only system capable of preserving freedoms." Vargas Llosa laments that most Peruvians were swayed more by symbols than by ideas. For example, he had decided not to issue party identification cards, as the Apristas, Communists, and Socialists did, in order to focus people's attention on concepts, rather than on paraphernalia. However, the pressure to create cards and banners became so great that local campaign managers started to make their own, thereby initiating an uncontrollable proliferation of logos. Many people simply would not join a party that offered less flashy ID cards than their neighbors'.

Vargas Llosa also deplores his country's tradition of caciques, or local strongmen. Even within the...