Touchstones: Essays In Literature, Art And Politics

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Paradise is not of this world and those who set out to look for it or to construct it here are irremediably condemned to failure.

‘Traces of Gauguin’

Some ten years after the publication of an anthology of essays by Mario Vargas Llosa entitled Making Waves, this new volume, Touchstones, includes essays written, in the main, over this intervening decade. ‘Touchstone’ is the title of Vargas Llosa’s regular column — ‘Piedra de toque’ — in the Spanish newspaper El País. The two contrasting titles naturally imply a shift in the writer’s outlook, between ‘making waves’ and using a touchstone, between being immersed in every debate — as epitomised by his running for the presidency of Peru in the late 1980s — and having a more detached, perhaps less optimistic view of the possibility of taming or overcoming the demons that haunt our own lives or inhabit wider society.

The critic Efraín Kristal has usefully divided the development of Mario Vargas Llosa’s work into three distinct periods from the early 1960s to the late 1990s — his socialist beginnings, in which his novels diagnosed the corruption of capitalist society in Latin America; the liberal period which followed his break with the Latin American left in the 1970s, during which he explored the dangers of fanaticism and utopian thinking; and the period since losing the Peruvian elections of 1990, in which he seems to have lost his optimism regarding the effectiveness of political action. His contempt for authoritarianism remains as strong as ever, but is tempered by a recognition of the frailties of those with whom he disagrees.1

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