SOURCE: Berman, Paul. “The Novelist as Politician.” New Leader 77, no. 6 (6-20 June 1994): 5.

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.

A novelist who runs for president is a hyphenated personality, and A Fish in the Water, Mario Vargas Llosa's account of his 1990 bid for the presidency of Peru, is a hyphenated book. The even-numbered chapters recount his doomed campaign, the odd-numbered chapters recount his childhood and education up to the age of 22, when he departed provincial Peru for Paris and the big world. The narrative style has a hyphenation of its own. The even-numbered chapters are written with the muscular purposefulness that is typical of political analysis and ideological certainty.

“There are no doubt many bad things about our era.” Vargas Llosa writes in Chapter Two, “but there...