by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Storyteller is the tenth published novel by Peru’s best-known living author, Mario Vargas Llosa (1936- ). Though his fiction contains political and social commentary, for Vargas Llosa the novel is first and foremost a work of art. Vargas Llosa’s career can be divided into three periods according to major changes in his political outlook. In the 1960s he was a Marxist who enthusiastically supported the Cuban revolution. In the 1970s, after witnessing the authoritarianism of Castro’s government as well as the authoritarian tendencies of the left in Peru, Vargas Llosa became disillusioned with the Latin American left in general. Accordingly, he entered a neo-liberal phase during which he sought to strengthen artistic, political, and economic freedoms by actively supporting democracy and free market economics. The Storyteller was written during this phase and exemplifies his rejection of utopian notions of...