SOURCE: Sommer, Doris. “About-Face: The Talker Turns.” Boundary 2 23, no. 1 (spring 1996): 91-133.

In the following essay, Sommer expounds on the implications of the opening of Vargas Llosa's Storyteller, in which the narrator expresses frustration at his inability to escape his native Peru.

The first sentence of Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador (The Storyteller)¹ gives a start, a shock, a double take, as the narrator misses a step to gasp with surprise. Facing him is precisely the thing he had escaped. “I came to Firenze to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while, and behold, the damned country forced itself upon me this morning in the most unexpected way” (S [The Storyteller], 3; 7). The first move of the story is no departure but an about-face, a shocking recognition that Peru will not be left behind. Long before the narrator identifies himself as a writer named Mario Vargas Llosa, even before...