[The] highlighting of the more "colorful" episodes in Vargas Llosa's novels … has resulted in the impression that the writer's overriding concern is to show merely the sordid and perverse aspects of life in contemporary Peru.

Without any doubt [a] strong—and at times overbearing—interest in the more unusual details of human sexuality is a common ingredient of Vargas Llosa's work, but fortunately, in the last analysis, this represents a relatively insignificant feature of his novels. There are far more important (but less spectacular) qualities in the Peruvian writer's work, and in fact no better compendium of these can be found than Conversation in the Cathedral itself….

Few contemporary Latin American novelists have been as expansive in writing about their personal interpretation of literary and political theory as Vargas Llosa. The essence of this former aspect can be summarized quite simply: the writer is basically a rebel, a...