SOURCE: Dipple, Elizabeth. “Outside, Looking In: Aunt Julia and Vargas Llosa.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 1 (spring 1997): 58-69.

In the following essay, Dipple discusses Vargas Llosa's ambivalence in accepting the classification of much of his fiction as autobiographical.

In Mario Vargas Llosa's late 1980s novel The Storyteller, his typical and frequent narrator, who is a thinly fictionalized Vargas Llosa, beckons the reader to join him in Florence during an undated stay there, while Vargas Llosa, pursuing his European agenda, reads Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavelli in the tourist-ridden summer heat. The story that he draws us into, after seeing an exhibition of photographs depicting an Amazonian tribe by a recently deceased Italian photographer, is that of a college friend of his, a Peruvian Jew named Saul Zuratas, marked by otherness not only by his Jewish background but also by a huge disfiguring strawberry birthmark that covers the entire right...