SOURCE: Vargas Llosa, Mario. “A Bullfight in the Andes.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 1 (spring 1997): 35-51.

In the following essay, Vargas Llosa argues that Arguedas's first novel, Yawar Fiesta, succeeds as fiction because the narrator presents the world of the novel “as an indivisible though heartbreaking totality” from an anti-rational perspective Vargas Llosa concludes is deeply conservative.

Critics who praise José María Arguedas's first novel share the assumption that there is an essential correspondence between a work of fiction and the reality it “describes,” that a novel is successful to the extent that it faithfully represents its model; and so they underscore the similarities between this story's bloody fiesta and life in the Andes. I assume the opposite: that there is an incompatibility between reality and fiction that separates truth from lies (and a hidden complicity that ties them together, since one cannot exist without the other...