A Fish in Water: A Memoir. - book reviews

National Review, May 16, 1994 by Hugh Thomas

A BRILLIANT and successful novelist becomes so famous in his country that he turns to politics. A great speech opposing the nationalization of banks makes him an obvious leader of a new alliance of parties, some new, some old. He becomes the presidential candidate. Though the governing party hates him and tries an extraordinary number of dirty tricks against him, for months he is the leader in the polls. He is the first political leader to seem to ride to power on a distrust of power, derived from a careful reading of Aron, Popper, Hayek, Friedman, even Nozick. Then the presidency is stolen from him by a last-minute surge of support by the poor for an unknown Japanese immigrant. The novelist leaves for Paris, his country headed for ruin. But he, we know, will survive and prosper, for Paris has always been for him a mecca of the imagination, always "a moving spiritual and aesthetic experience, like burying oneself in a great book." And he had, too, "from an early age ... that ability to take leave of everything around me, to five in a world of fantasy, to recreate through imagination the make-believe stories that held me spellbound."

A scenario like this would be enough to destroy any normal writer. The events are too many, too confusing, too breathtaking. Mario Vargas Llosa rises triumphantly to the unprecedented challenge. His memoir is a dazzling performance, one of his very best books, full of curious, even surreal, events such as the last-minute intervention of the archbishop of Lima at Vargas Llosa's house after his defeat in the first round of the election.

The success of the book is even more remarkable since the author has chosen to interweave with his descriptions of his political life in the 1980s and 1990s an account of his own upbringing, mostly in Piura in northern Peru. This is followed by the fascinating story of his early life in Lima, his horrible times with his jealous and brutal father, his first loves and his first reading (the influence of Dumas is of particular interest). Then there are his first jobs, of which he once had seven at the same time. The description of life on the newspaper La Cronica is splendid, particularly the passages where he describes working with the chief crime reporter, Becerrita, a figure straight from Balzac, "with his vitriolic little eyes, grainy from lack of sleep, perpetually watchful, his shiny suits pressed countless times, reeking of tobacco and sweat ... a citizen of Hell, for whom the underworld haunts of the city held no secrets."

Equally to the point is the paragraph on the swan song of the Peruvian brothel--an event that led the way, in the author's opinion, to "the banalization of sex . . . stripped of mystery and taboos . . . a (mere) gymnastic exercise, a temporary diversion," something very different from "the central mystery of life," of which the brothel was the temple.

My only complaint about the book is that there is, as it were, a large gap in the middle. The childhood-and-youth section ends with the departure of Vargas Llosa with his first wife, his aunt Julia, for Paris in 1958; and his launching of the Freedom movement after the great meeting protesting against the Socialist Party in 1987. What, the reader wants urgently to know, happened in between? Of course, the reader of Vargas Llosa's other works knows all about Aunt Julia, and most of us know that, at some point in the Sixties, perhaps in London, Vargas Llosa ceased to support the Left. The author became famous nationally and internationally. But what about the end of his marriage with Julia, his second marriage, with his cousin Patricia, who plays quite a part in the account of the campaign of 1991? How long did he live in Paris? Etc. Of course, all this will presumably be material for another volume of memoirs, doubtless just as interesting, though for drama, irony, and unexpected events this volume will be hard to beat.

One of the charms of this book is the pictures given of people who influenced Mario Vargas Llosa at different stages in his career. The heroes include the delightful Llosa family, so much of a contrast with the Vargases, even though the author's father in the end emerges as an impoverished worker in the United States, never taking a penny from his successful son. Among remote relations on his mother's side was Uncle Jose Luis--well-spoken, bow-tied, his hat with ribbon-bound brim, and his short legs wide apart--who became suddenly and briefly president of the republic in the Forties. There is a quick portrait of the honest and generous anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, later a guru of the murderous Shining Path movement. Then there is the great scholar and historian, later foreign minister Porras Barrenechea, for whom the author worked as a research assistant, and who, despite years of labor, never finished his study of the conquest by Pizarro. Another fine passage is Vargas Llosa's brooding on why so many intellectuals take up left-wing attitudes: for the great majority of them, such beliefs "were only a strategy to get ahead." One of these opportunists confirmed that to a friend: "Tell Mario not to pay attention to the things that I am declaring against him, because they represent only favorable opportunities for me."