SOURCE: Booker, M. Keith. “Fiction and ‘Real Life’: Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35, no. 2 (winter 1994): 111-27.

In the following essay, Booker compares Vargas Llosa and Vladimir Nabokov's approaches to the depiction of realism in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, respectively, asserting that both works “are centrally concerned with the relationship between fiction and reality.”

Both The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight are centrally concerned with the relationship between fiction and reality, although Nabokov and Vargas Llosa themselves ostensibly hold very different attitudes about the nature of this relationship. Debra Castillo notes that the ambiguity of the title of Mario Vargas Llosa's Historia de Mayta “provides a central conceit for the work itself,” because the double meaning of...