Between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, Latin America produced an extraordinary number of novels. They were soon recognized, edited, published, and translated by and for European and North American intellectual and cultural markets. The event was called the Boom of the Latin American novel. In 1963 the Boom defined its character and gained definitive access to those markets when Mario Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero received a prestigious award granted by the publishing house Seix Barral of Barcelona. Some say the Boom ended in 1976, with the well-known violent encounter between Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garda Marquez in a Mexico City movie theater.

In spite of being part of these two key moments in the Boom's history, Vargas Llosa has published a memoir that barely touches on any events from those fundamental years in his writing career. Published thirty-one years after Vargas Llosa's international debut, A Fish in the Water extensively collects various events from pre- and post-Boom years, favoring recent events in which Vargas Llosa portrays himself as a political and moral leader, the best candidate for the Peruvian presidency, a man—possibly the only Peruvian—of spiritual and material success or, at least, one with an international image constructed as such.

Vargas Llosa's first novel (written at age twenty-three) can be seen as the Boom's first product to obtain European sponsorship and markets. The novel was also part of the massive production and consumption of a vocabulary that would later become the predominant instrument for the political interpretation of Latin America. Within the renewed discussion concerning the social responsibilities of literature during the 1960s, the writer's public acts redefined the Latin American tradition of literature and politics joined by the power of words. For his readers, Vargas Llosa's life became a part of any argument regarding ideologies. As a professional intellectual with a political position, he has exemplified the antagonisms of his time: he has been on both sides of the Cold War, first supporting the Cuban revolution and later distancing himself from any leftist thought.

Vargas Llosa has successfully produced modern fictional images of Latin America. His fame has given his words a powerful platform from which he can be an important essayist producing political imagery. But his fiction and his analytical thought, despite the use of different strategies to persuade and captivate his public, are part of a single verbal world. His memoir combines strategies from both genres like a coin joining two sides, back to back, in apparent opposition, an encounter between fiction and methodical analysis.

A Fish in the Water, a five-hundred-page volume, is organized in twenty chapters symmetrically intercalating two different temporal sequences in parallel progression: an itinerary of his short political career in Peru (from 1987 to 1990) and an autobiography of his years as an apprentice writer. The book, subtitled “A Memoir,” opens with a fragment of Max Weber's work, chosen, I think, because it embodies Vargas Llosa's major concerns: a good/evil dichotomy combining religious and political rhetoric. Weber writes: “anyone who becomes involved in politics, that is to say, anyone who agrees to use power and violence as means, has sealed a pact with the devil. … Anyone that does not see this is a child, politically speaking.” After this epigraph, the two narrative threads weave together to form the biography of one protagonist split into two spheres of existence.

The sequence of memories from childhood to youth and the detailed sequence of recent events in the mature writer's life develop their own cause-and-effect relationships. They establish analogies that in the end create a new product by means of their similarities. This final product is the fusing and confusing of both protagonists as the adult writer begins to relive his apprenticeship in an unknown field. Thus his political career turns into a brief new period of childhood and youth where, as a “political novice,” he discovers that real politics consist “almost exclusively of maneuvers, intrigues, plots, paranoias, betrayals, a great deal of calculation, no little cynicism, and every variety of con game” (87).

From distant memories, Vargas Llosa chooses episodes of a happy infancy, without a father, in Bolivia; of an unbearable childhood, in “Lima the Horrible” (a name coined during the thirties by the Peruvian poet Cesar Moro) in the heart of paternal tyranny and a dysfunctional family; of a difficult adolescence in a military school resembling Peruvian male society on a smaller scale; of an early adulthood given over to journalistic writing, bohemian promiscuity, and liberation from paternal torment; of separation from the father and from Lima and the subsequent return to the 11 right path” under the protection of the maternal family and the coastal province; of a young intellectual's explorations as a university student caught between communism and existentialism; of an impulsive adult, adventurous in marriage and literature; of marital ties with the maternal family and their material and emotional support; and of a trip to Paris, ending the narration with the young writer on the threshold of the door to success.

The sequence of recent events deals with topics related to the presidential campaign rather than episodes geared toward narrative climax. The selection of details about Peruvian politicians and the upper class resembles the type of notes taken by foreign travelers more than a century ago concerning “customs and manners.” From time to time there are reflections, analyses, judgments, attacks, and defenses. Through autobiography, the narrator and main character form a sole voice, a subjectivity dominating every aspect included in their discourse.¹

Nevertheless, the nature of those events seems to belong to the public domain: facts that can be traced and confirmed by the objectivity of research. They occur between 1987 and 1990, these boundaries formed by political landmarks: the Alan Garda administration's attempt to nationalize the banking system, and the last presidential election. The chapters are organized to outline the writer's itinerary in this flow of historical events. His participation consists mainly of speeches at mass demonstrations, the founding of political organizations (such as the Democratic Front and the Movimiento Libertad), and duties required by his presidential campaign in Peruvian territory and overseas. These scenes are surrounded by brief anecdotes and a long annotated list of auspicious and ominous names, woven into the quick ascension and abrupt finale of Mario Vargas Llosa as a public figure in the Peruvian political arena. The level of detailed information reveals documentary and even judicial intentions, giving a sense of settling accounts for an improbable future trial.² Because of the amount of information on display that can be corroborated and because of the journalistic, even sociological tone of the language, the political sequence differs greatly from the undocumented facts and intimate tone of the childhood-youth memories. Throughout the former, Vargas Llosa's voice becomes testimonial, the “mouth” of an eyewitness attempting to represent a subordinate group, victim of a political system and an aberrant society, struggling for justice. Two omniscient narrators methodically overlap: one interferes and condemns, the other uses scientific precision to conceal his proximity to the fictionalization of reality. One could say that Vargas Llosa is at his most fictional when he appears most truthful.

Through these and other narrative strategies, the relationships of cause and effect in the recent memory sequence (a plot that claims to be an objective testimony) become the standard by which the sequence of distant events (the most subjective) is arranged and evaluated. Thus one discovers that the writer's formative period was also a political career toward the presidency. At the same time, the episodes of infancy and adolescence extend their emotive forces toward the recent events, fusing the conclusions of both sequences (artistic success and electoral failure) into one structure. When the reader finishes the book, both endings rise up as a single triumphant and heroic story.

In the realms of the nuclear family and nationality the protagonist confronts an identity conflict: whether Or not to belong to an order established in terms of patriarchal rules, and how one might overcome these rules. The protagonist belongs to a family and a nation without having chosen them and without being able to reject them. Liberation from father/fatherland is a struggle toward impossible success. To be free from the paternal order is a deception: “That interview … marked my definitive emancipation from my father. Although his shadow will doubtless accompany me to my grave, and although at times, even today, all at once the memory of some scene, of some image of the years he had complete authority over me gives me a sudden hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach” (334). Something similar occurs to the links with the fatherland's order: “Although I was born in Peru … my vocation is that of a cosmopolitan and an expatriate who has always detested nationalism. … [Nevertheless] what happens in Peru affects me more—makes me happier or irritates me more—than what happens elsewhere. … I feel that between me and the Peruvians of any race, language, and social status, for better or for worse—especially for worse—there is something that ties me to them in a seemingly invincible way” (42).

The conflict with the paternal order is deferred and then left behind without resolution: “and even though I always tried to be polite to him, I never showed him more affection than I felt—that is to say, none whatsoever. The terrible rancor, my burning hatred of him in my childhood, gradually disappeared in the course of those years” (335). The narrative offers an alternative in order to reduce tension, allowing the story to continue: a trip to seek sanctuary in the maternal family, in the coastal province or in a foreign land. But family and state overlap: “Perhaps saying that I love my country is not true. I often loathe it, and hundreds of times since I was young I have promised myself to live a long way from Peru forever and not to write anything more about it and forget its aberrations. But the fact is that it is continually on my mind, and whether I am living in it or residing abroad as an expatriate, to me it is a constant torment” (43).

In this scenario of paternal patria potestas one can see the concealed coherence of his political discourse, where modern national and electoral problems are explained as being a result of “racism, ethnic prejudice, social resentment” (498). Those are the same factors that cause the collapse of his family—a social nucleus: “But the real reason for the failure of their marriage was not my father's jealousy or his bad disposition, but the national disease that gets called by other names, the one that infests every stratum and every family in the country and leaves them all with a bad aftertaste of hatred, poisoning the lives of Peruvians in the form of resentment and social complexes” (5).

In the story of Vargas Llosa's life his father's marriage fails. In the story of Vargas Llosa's political career the country fails, confined to a cyclic and invariable plot: “We always used to talk politics whenever we were together, and each time, somewhat cast over with sickly melancholy, we wondered why everything in Peru always tended to get worse” (37-38). A strong reason for this failure is what he calls a Third World (tercermundista) disposition: “One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them. There is no better philosophy than that for keeping them in a state of backwardness for all time to come” (44). Vargas Llosa insinuates that this tercermundismo is pre-Columbian and essential to the “ancient realm” that is Peru because it fuses with the “social resentment” which (he feels) “existed in Peru since before the arrival of Europeans” (498).

On the other hand, a detailed and extensive discourse offers political and economic solutions for the country:

The recurrent theme of my three speeches had been that the way out of poverty does not lie in distributing the little wealth that exists but in creating more. And in order to do that markets must be opened up, competition and individual initiative encouraged, private property not be fought against but extended to the greatest number, our economy and our psychology taken out of the grip of the state, and the handout mentality that expects everything from the state replaced by a modern outlook that entrusts the responsibility for economic life to civil society and the market.

(41)

Here it seems inconsistent to argue resentment in a technical analysis of the origins of national problems. The novelistic strategies of the fiction writer and the technical reasoning of the former presidential candidate's discourse interlace successfully because of a strong structure of analogies—a solid base for an artistic construction that persuades through polysemy and ambiguity.

Mixing “urgent letter” and “memorandum” styles, the book closes with an epilogue in which the perspective of the author-narrator (with respect to his private and public life) and the events of historic reality converge, Vargas Llosa imposes the successful conclusion of the young writer story onto the story of his political career. He only appears to have failed and thus his misfortune gains novelistic intrigue. The book's plot has no proper conclusion; the epilogue closes the book by endowing “real” events—those not organized by the memoir—with a sequence that coincides with the writer's story. While Peru fails, Vargas Llosa's truth succeeds: “Early in the morning on April 6, 1992, I was awakened by a telephone call from Lima. Alberto Fujimori had just announced on television, to everyone's surprise, his decision to close Congress. … In this way, the democratic system reestablished in Peru in 1980, after twelve years of military dictatorship, had its very foundations destroyed yet again, by someone whom, two years before, the Peruvian people bad elected president” (525).

In A Fish in the Water, with the honesty of a fiction writer, Vargas Llosa brings together major problems being discussed in contemporary literature. Alongside the truth, if it exists, his realism, verisimilitude, autobiography, testimony, and sociology become as ambiguous as our perception of reality. This book creates a solid possible world, which is why, in my opinion, it functions as a novel. The book is the novel of his life, and therein lies its success. The problem presented by a book such as A Fish in the Water, which claims to be sociological truth, is its ambiguity with regard to the validity of a subjective interpretation of the Peruvian political situation, given its apparent neutrality. This problem of blurred borders has led to the mishandling and manipulation of Vargas Llosa's work and public life.

Notes

1. These strategies bring to mind Vargas Llosa's description of those Victor Hugo creates in Les Miserables, a gigantic presence interfering in the flow of events, judging, anathematizing: “he who judges and sentences does not listen, he listens to himself; he does not dialogue, he speaks only to himself” (“Los Miserables: el ultimo clasico” 34; my translation).

2. This recalls Vargas Llosa's study of Flaubert's techniques: “one of the most effective tactics for concealing the existence of the omniscient narrator is to make of him an impartial and meticulous gaze, eyes that observe the fictitious reality from a distance that never varies and a mouth that relates what those eyes see with scientific precision and total neutrality … [T]he verisimilitude of what is recounted depends on this invisibility” (The Perpetual Orgy 227-28).

Works Cited

Vargas Llosa, Mario. A Fish in the Water. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994.

———. “Los Miserables: el ultimo clasico.” Cielo abierto 23 (Jan.-Mar. 1983): 32-40.

———. The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and “Madame Bovary.” Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986.