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.

In the following essay, Wasserman explores the phenomenon of intertextuality in Vargas Llosa's writing, particularly in La guerra del fin del mundo, his retelling of Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões.

In the following essay, Booker compares Vargas Llosa and Vladimir Nabokov's approaches to the depiction of realism in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, respectively, asserting that both works “are centrally concerned with the relationship between fiction and reality.”

In the following essay, Cohn observes that “intertextuality pervades” Lituma en los Andes, asserting that an effective reading of the novel considers its political and social backdrop “as well as Vargas Llosa's interpretation of its significance from an evolutionary standpoint.”

In the following interview, Vargas Llosa speaks on several subjects, including authors and literature that have influenced him, the creative process, and the significance of writing in his life.

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.

Castro-Klarén is a Peruvian-born educator specializing in Latin American literature. In the following excerpt, she studies the plot of The War of the End of the World, comparing Vargas Llosa's narrative to Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões (1903), on which it is based.

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

In the following essay, Krauze remarks on the political climate of Peru circa 1990 and Vargas Llosa's influence in Peruvian politics.

In the following interview, Vargas Llosa discusses the influence of history and other authors on his work as well as explaining his personal view of fiction as the “secret reality.”

In the following excerpt, Davis asserts that The War of the End of the World. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and Who Killed Palomino Molero? feature antiheroes.

In the following excerpt, Williams provides an overview of Vargas Llosa's career and the literary, social, and political contexts that influenced his writing.

In the following essay, Romeu examines how the influence of the equatorial climate, experienced by Vargas Llosa and author Alejo Carpentier during separate jungle expeditions, impacted their writing in The Storyteller and The Lost Steps, respectively.

In the following interview—originally conducted in June 2000 and published in the June 24, 2000, edition of El Comercio—Vargas Llosa discusses the implications of the computerization of literature, the most successful novels of the past century, and the Boom period in Latin American literature.

In the following essay, Standish contends that The Storyteller examines storytelling as a sacred vocation in society.

In the following essay, Kristal examines Captain Pantoja and the Special Service as an illustration of Vargas Llosa's period of “artistic transition” in the early 1970s, during which the author began to move away from rigidly rule-abiding characters to fanatics who challenge any impediment to their fervent beliefs.

In the following essay, Rebaza-Soraluz criticizes A Fish in the Water for failing to discuss Vargas Llosa's personal experiences during the Boom period in Latin American literature, concluding that the memoir actually “functions as a novel.”

In the following excerpt, Guzman contends that the political interpretation of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is key to a full understanding of the novel.

In the following essay, which is adapted from his A Writer's Reality, Vargas Llosa explains that he intended The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta to expose the role of fictions in life.

Below, Updike describes Vargas Llosa's erotic novel, In Praise of the Stepmother, as a work that vividly and seriously treats the subject of sex and sensuality.

Wood is an English-born educator, critic, and screenwriter. In the following excerpt, he praises the narrative technique of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta while finding that Vargas Llosa fails to communicate his intended philosophical themes.

[The appearance of military characters] is reiterated with insistence [in the novels of Vargas Llosa], almost in a manic way; they operate by means of saturation and concentration in narrative texts which, on the other hand, appear crammed full of characters, filled to the brim with entire human populations. Among that mass, however, the military stand out with an unmistakable brilliance which is not just that of their uniforms: they are there to tell us something, a great deal, about the author, his imagin...

[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 insig...

Vargas Llosa attempts the breakthrough into a new expression that aims to portray or perhaps even to create what he calls "total reality" by means of the "total novel."… Vargas Llosa seems to be struggling toward something new, something more apt as an expression of contemporary Spanish American reality. But the experimentation often seems to be only that, an attempt at the "new," which of course does reflect the Latin American zeitgeist exceedingly well. The...

An American novelist and critic, Le Guin is considered one of the most important authors in contemporary science fiction and fantasy literature. Her works have been especially praised for their style, rich inventiveness, and deep humanism. In the following excerpt, she praises The Storyteller, contending that Vargas Llosa's imaginative rendering of a preserved ancient culture provokes much-needed self-examination by modern society.

In the following review, Berman asserts that A Fish in the Water, though well-written, demonstrates that Vargas Llosa is “better suited to being a novelist” than a politician.

Vargas Llosa delivered the famous speech "Literature Is Fire" in Caracas, Venezuela, upon acceptance of the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which he was awarded for The Green House. In the following excerpt from that speech, he expounds on the writer's vocation as the critic and conscience of society.

[Going] beyond the simple boundaries of a superficial reading of the plot [of The Time of the Hero]—in which "the city" and "the school" appear as the central spaces of the narration—other darker, more profound, more functional and more labyrinthine worlds emphasize the ambiguous characteristic of duplicity (personal, temporal, conceptual and functional), so that the same characteristic will be the center of contradiction, the grounds for two opposite poles, for two...

Considered an extraordinary stylist and a perceptive observer of the human condition, Updike is one of America's most distinguished men of letters. Best known for such novels as Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), he is a chronicler of life in Protestant, middle-class America. In the following excerpt, he finds that Who Killed Palomino Molero? is a compelling portrait of racism in Latin America and of virtue amid pervasive corruption.

In the following review, Eder describes Death in the Andes as “less successful and more awkward” than Real Life of Alejandro Mayta but notes that Death in the Andes is “in some ways more haunting.”

In his loudly acclaimed novel The War of the End of the World … Vargas Llosa sets down with appalling and ferocious clarity his vision of the tragic consequences for ordinary people of millenarianism of whatever kind. He has written before, in his novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, about the emergence in remote rural parts of an ascetic figure who becomes a focus of resistance to a militaristic state. That was primarily a comic novel, however, whereas the new book is as dark as spilled bl...

In the following review of Death in the Andes, Bell-Villada argues that Vargas Llosa “wrote better books when he was a man of the left,” noting that his “greatest works” were written when the author was a sympathizer with 1960s radicalism.

[Conversation in the Cathedral] (together with [Vargas Llosa's] earlier novels) is a splendid and admirable proof of how three apparently disparate impulses—moral rage, authorial autoindulgence, and severe discipline—can combine into an harmonic whole of shattering power and icy autonomy. Read anything by Mario Vargas Llosa and you will be amazed by the contrast between the heat of the corruptions or perversions narrated and the formal and linguistic frost glittering over them…. ...

People go to the movies in Vargas Llosa's The Cubs and Other Stories, but the book itself evokes other books rather than films. Not because it makes allusions or seems derivative, but because it aspires so transparently to literature, conjures up so clearly the decorous company of sensitive, intelligent, well-written texts it wishes to join. Vargas Llosa himself, in an engaging and modest preface written for this translation, says the book is derivative, attributes one story to the influence of Paul ...

In the following review, Menton offers praise for Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo, ranking it among the author's four best novels.

With his last novel, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa surprised many of his admirers by joining the literary carnival. Prior to this dizzyingly playful account of an army officer assigned to supply a party of prostitutes to deprived jungle soldiers, the author had produced a stark short-story collection, translated as The Cubs, and three long, increasingly complex novels, The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversation in the Cathedral, all exploring wi...

In the following review, Eder asserts that The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto offers “stylish turns of phrase but little other excitement,” claiming that the novel is merely “Rigoberto, or perhaps Vargas Llosa, taking his thoughts for a walk.”

In the following review, Angier asserts that, despite Vargas Llosa's skillful prose, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is merely a work of literary “pornography.”

The work of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa … has established him as a major figure in contemporary Latin American letters. His new book [The War of the End of the World] should confirm this: even in translation it overshadows the majority of novels published here in the past few years. Indeed, it makes most recent American fiction seem very small, very private, very gray, and very timid. The War of the End of the World is based on a true incident that occurred in Brazil in the final years o...

In the following review, Smee lauds Vargas Llosa's narrative techniques in The Way to Paradise, calling the work “elegant and involving.”

If writing about himself, exposing himself as in "una ceremonia parecida al strip tease" (Historia secreta de una novela), is what Vargas Llosa has done up to now under various disguises, then [La tía Julia y el escribidor] constitutes an exercise in boldness and brazenness. Half of La tía Julia is the account of an episode from the writer's youth … and the writer does not even hide behind a character: the protagonist is unmistakably named Varguitas o Marito, which ...

In the following review, Heawood criticizes Vargas Llosa's unsure and anxious characterizations in The Way to Paradise.

A pox on translations! We long for a writer's natural line, and we usually get a voice that sounds broken and silly. It may not even be the translator's fault. How do you render the "music" of one language into another and still manage to hold on to the meaning of a word? And what if the prose has an unconventional "music," a rhythm that depends heavily on the exact placement of words? Such is the predicament of "The Cubs" ("Los Cachorros"...

With frustrated soldiers going sexually amok in Amazon outposts, and civilian fathers and husbands up in arms about this lewd misconduct, the Peruvian top brass appoint loyal career administrator Capt. Pantaleón Pantoja to solve the problem. And solve it he does [in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service]—too well and none too wisely. In the heat of the tropical rainforest, covert in mufti, with his mother, wife and new-born daughter housed away in civilian secrecy, a diligent Pantoja quietly...

From the beginning Vargas Llosa was accused by the friendliest of his critics of "the bad habit of withholding vital information." In his impressive first novel, La Ciudad y los Perros, what the dog-eat-dog violence of a military school is intended to symbolize depends on a series of interior monologues in the mind of a character whose identity is not revealed until the end of the book. The young novelist idolized Faulkner and may have copied from him this lack of respect for the reader, but h...

In the following review, Foster offers a positive assessment of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, calling the novel “a masterful exploration of the abyss of erotic endeavors.”

In the following review, the critic commends Vargas Llosa's skill with the journalistic form in The Language of Passion.

Mario Vargas Llosa has the ability to work on many different levels. On the one hand, he can produce a complicated study of Flaubert—"The Perpetual Orgy," published in 1975; on the other hand, he can write an uproariously slapstick novel ["Captain Pantoja and the Special Service"] that reads like a Peruvian "Catch-22" or "M∗A∗S∗H." What Mr. Vargas Llosa borrows from Flaubert is his stylistic technique; in this case, the use ...

In the following review, the critic praises The Language of Passion and argues that “these essays should widen Vargas Llosa's appeal considerably, allowing new readers to share his passion.”

In Vargas Llosa's comic novel [Captain Pantoja and the Special Service], Pantoja, captain in the Peruvian army, is sent to the backcountry city of Iquitos to implement a special service for soothing the troops' lust so set to boiling by the jungle heat, spicy foods, and the incredibly beautiful women of Iquitos. With dedication and probity, Pantoja, an officer whom the term "regular army" fits perfectly, sets out to develop a complex and elaborate operation which will provide the...