SOURCE: "Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral: Power Politics in a Corrupt Society," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4, Winter, 1987, pp. 493-509.

An American educator and critic who specializes in the study of Modernist literature, Rossman is the author and the editor of several books about D. H. Lawrence. In the following essay, he focuses on characterization in his examination of the themes and ideas presented in Conversation in the Cathedral.

Vargas Llosa on the Difference Between Latin American Novels and Those of Europe and North America:

The historical reality, the framework of experiences within which the Latin American novelist writes, is a reality threatened with extinction. This perspective is traditionally the one which has nurtured the illusion—naïve, demented, but nevertheless formidable—of wishing to recapture with fantasy and words the total image of a world, of seeking to write novels that express this total reality...