Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Vargas Llosa, Mario (Vol. 85) - Peter Standish (essay date Spring 1991)


Vargas Llosa, Mario (Vol. 85) - Peter Standish (essay date Spring 1991)

Peter Standish (essay date Spring 1991)

SOURCE: "Vargas Llosa's Parrot," in Hispanic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 143-51.

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

Vargas Llosa on literature and history:

[Literature] is the domain par excellence of ambiguity. It is always subjective; it deals in half truths, relative truths, literary truths which frequently constitute flagrant historical inaccuracies or even lies. Although the almost cinematographic description of the battle of Waterloo which features in Les Misérables may exalt us, we are aware that this was a contest fought and won by Victor Hugo, and not the one lost by Napoleon. Or—to cite a Valencian classic (since I write this in Valencia)—the conquest of England by the Moors described in Tirant lo Blanc is totally...

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