Novelist portrays life of Peruvian Trotskyist

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The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, by Mario Vargas Llosa. Aventura Press, Random House, New York, It is virtually unprecedented that an internationally acclaimed novelist would choose as his subject the life of a Trotskyist militant. For that reason—along with the brilliance of the writing—this book deserves the Vargas Llosa is a political liberal who criticizes revolutionary regimes of Cuba and Nicaragua from right. He has served in the government of his native Peru and has been compared to V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian whose books and articles have criticized political Both writers live in Europe. The front cover of "Alejandro Mayta" quotes the establishment American author John Updike, who says that "Mario Vargas Llosa has replaced Gabriel Garcia Marquez as the South American novelist for gringos to catch up on." Garcia Marquez is the best known of the radical Latin American their newspapers, even the actual surname of a founding writers, so the quote is actually a political broadside. member. His understanding of the politics of the groups involved is about 90 percent correct, which in my Vargas Llosa uses garbage heaps symbolically in the book, and I believe he has written it as a warning to the Latin American ruling classes to clean up their act, or The authenticity of this writing is striking. No other face a political apocalypse in the form of radical major novelist has written about Trotskyism with this degree of understanding and realism since James T.

Farrell, who was a supporter of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States during the late 1930s.

The novel is set in the near future, in which Cuban However, Vargas Llosa's politics are very different and U.S. troops may be entering a Peru already engulfed from Farrell's, and the story he chooses to invent reflects by civil war. The story is told by a narrator who is that. The events of the novel, framed by powerful similar to Vargas Llosa himself, a writer researching an referents to reality, are entirely fictional and at great obscure 1958 Andean uprising, which he will recast as Alejandro Mayta is a member of the tiny Revolutionary Workers Party. Now in his mid-forties, he Trotskyist organizations, the real names of has led the difficult, poverty-stricken existence of a 1986, 310 pages. $6.95.

attention of the radical press.

BOOK REVIEW militancy in the underdeveloped countries. revolution.

A striking realism fiction.

Vargas Llosa uses the real names of the existing Peruvian the the opinion is very good variance with the actual events of that time. revolutionary. Jail, police isolation have been his lot. comrades, becomes the crux of the story. revolt, and ultimately Mayta himself.

feelings emerge vividly. intact.

such as Vargas Llosa.

its own intent. so marginalized and comical?

participant in the great battles of our era.

political Complex storytelling Disturbing questions