A Writer's Reality.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

In A Writer's Reality Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa returns to a subject that has fascinated him for years: the creative process. However, this book--based on eight lectures he delivered in English at Syracuse University--is not merely a recap of other books on related themes, such as his 1990 collection of critiques and essays La verdad de las mentiras (The Truth of Lies). Instead, A Writer's Reality is a perceptive, methodical exploration of the human need to generate fiction and of the factors that led to the creation of six of the author's own novels.

The first chapter is devoted to Jorge Luis Borges, who for Vargas Llosa, was not so much an influence--since his style was so personal as to be inimitable--as an example of innovation. Vargas Llosa admires the musicality of Borges' prose, as well as its precision and concision. He points out that in contrast to the wordiness that usually characterizes Spanish writing, Borges' style is distinct for its frugality. But while Borges is intensely cerebral, he is also a master storyteller. Vargas Llosa is fascinated with the Argentine's gift for compression--for packing layers of meaning into a short text--and with his use of Argentine mythology. On the other hand, he criticizes Borges' ethnocentricity. "The black, the Indian, the primitive often appear in his stories as inferior, wallowing in a state of barbarism ..." he writes. However, in Vargas Llosa's view, this does not diminish his immense contribution to the development of a new Latin American literature.

In his chapter on early Peruvian writing, the author draws some interesting conclusions about the conquistadors' need to embellish their acts in the chronicles. He is certainly not the first to point out the relationship between the chronicles and the novels of chivalry, but his views on the consequences of this sort of "enhancement of the facts" are unique. The Inquisitors banned fiction from the colonies, Vargas Llosa reminds us, because they viewed novels as dangerous for the spiritual development of society. But, comments the author, the Inquisitors could not imagine that "the appetite for lies, that is, for escaping objective reality through illusions, was so powerful and so deeply rooted in the human spirit that once the novel could not be used to satisfy it, all other disciplines and genres in which ideas could flow freely would be used as a substitute--history, religion, poetry, science, art, speeches, journalism, and the...