A novelist who runs for president is a hyphenated personality, and A Fish in the Water, Mario Vargas Llosa's account of his 1990 bid for the presidency of Peru, is a hyphenated book. The even-numbered chapters recount his doomed campaign, the odd-numbered chapters recount his childhood and education up to the age of 22, when he departed provincial Peru for Paris and the big world. The narrative style has a hyphenation of its own. The even-numbered chapters are written with the muscular purposefulness that is typical of political analysis and ideological certainty.

“There are no doubt many bad things about our era.” Vargas Llosa writes in Chapter Two, “but there is one very good one, without precedent in history. Countries today can choose to be prosperous.” The way to make that choice, he affirms, is by adopting the free market strategies of the Asian “Tigers,” though he carefully adds that free markets should not mean unfree governmental systems. He invokes Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayck. He inveighs against mercantilism, statism, populism, authoritarianism, and other lamentable “isms” that keep countries like Peru in a wretched condition. He has his irritated say about the self-serving political allies and hostile “cut-rate intellectuals” (as he calls them) who made it difficult for him to present these cerebral theories to the people of Peru in the course of his campaign.

In the odd-numbered chapters the muscular purposefulness dissolves at once. The author reminisces about his parents and their difficult marriage, the nastiness of his father, the complicated ties of his extended family, his boyhood adventures in a military academy, his amorous and sexual explorations with girlfriends and prostitutes. The flow of those memories is guided (or appears to be guided) only by the association of names and stories, as in fiction.

I assume Vargas Llosa sought to replicate here the wonderfully successful structure of his novel The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. That similarly jumps back and forth between past and present: the past of an old Peruvian Trotskyist who worked hard years ago to set up an idealistic revolutionary guerrilla movement, the present of that same man, now disillusioned, as he watches modern Peru get devastated by the ugly terrorism he himself did so much to bring about.

But the jumping back and forth in A Fish in the Water brings out something that you don't see in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. It is a contrast between two kinds of imagination: the playful (in the childhood chapters) versus the forceful (in the political chapters); the curious versus the didactic; the rueful versus the angry. And of the two imaginations, the one that is playful and literary ends up producing chapters that are noticeably more vivid—especially when the writer turns to the topic of literature itself, which was always a childhood pleasure for him and was soon enough (by his teenage years as a newspaper journalist) a source of income.

Nothing in the political chapters is so impassioned as Vargas Llosa's recollection of hiding out at military school, like some dissident in a dictatorship hunched over a samizdat manuscript, reading paperback novels: “I read at recess and at hours when I was supposed to be studying, hiding the book during classes underneath my notebooks, and sneaked out of the classroom to go read in the arbor next to the swimming pool, and read, at night, when it was my turn to be on guard duty, sitting on the floor of chipped white tiles, in the dim light of the dormitory bathroom.”

He read Victor Hugo in those days, and above all Alexandre Dumas—“the author to whom I am most grateful”: “The saga of d'Artagnan, which begins with the young Gascon arriving in Paris as a forsaken provincial and ends many years later, at the siege of La Rochelle, when he dies, without having received the marshal's baton that the King is sending him via a postboy, is one of the most important things to have happened to me in my life.”

For by reading Dumas, Vargas Llosa conceived a lifelong passion for France, a land of adventure and derring-do (as he first imagined), later on the land of Jean-Paul Sartre (whose magazine he read during his university days), later still the land he happily fled to when, having won a literary contest, he finally got the opportunity to leave Peru. Of course, his adult reading in Popper and von Hayck, as he describes it in the even-numbered political chapters, is also important to him. But not compared with the influence of that titan of his childhood, the author of The Three Musketeers!

The political chapters have their vivid passages, too. The presidential campaign was a dirty affair, and Vargas Llosa indulges a malicious pleasure in recounting some of the nasty things that were done against him, the slanderous and fraudulent leaflets that were distributed for instance.

One of those leaflets, he tells us, “was a supposed letter from me to the militants of Libertad [his political movement], in which, making a show of that brutal frankness I boasted of, I told them that, yes, we had to take jobs away from a million employees for the shock (the economic reform) to be a success, and that, without doubt, many thousands of Peruvians would die of hunger during the early days of the reforms, but that there would be prosperous times and that if, with the reform of education hundreds of thousands of poor never learned how to read and write, things would be better for their children or their grandchildren, and that it was also true that I'd married one of my aunts and then a first cousin of mine and later on I might possibly marry a niece, and that I wasn't ashamed of it because that was what freedom was for.”

Yet a wry and amusing passage like that mostly arouses the reader's interest in the candidate's long-ago real-life marriage to his “aunt”—actually his uncle's sister-in-law—particularly when we recall from the novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter that at the time they tied the knot he was 19 and she was 13 years older. In the odd-numbered chapters, we learn about Aunt Julia and how a few innocent outings to the cinema with her led to one thing and another; and more liveliness radiates from those amorous remembrances than from any of Vargas Llosa's earnest arguments about the need for Peru to cultivate a higher tone in its political campaigns.

I came away from A Fish in the Water thinking that, if I were Peruvian, I might well have voted for Vargas Llosa in 1990, even if his free-market doctrines are worrisomely dogmatic. (One part of his alliance did consist, in fact, of Social Democrats, who preferred to speak of markets that were “social” instead of “free.”) His chief opponent, Alberto Fujimori, once he became president, more or less enacted Vargas Llosa's economic program anyway and with good effect—except that Fujimori combined the program with the destruction of democracy. As Vargas Llosa says, this means that the deepest cause of Peru's backwardness, the tradition of authoritarianism, has actually been strengthened. But it is hard to see that Vargas Llosa would have been a good president, except in comparison to a dictator. He loves ideology too much, the political life and his fellow politicians too little.

The contrast between even-numbered and odd-numbered chapters shows that, as everyone would have guessed, the defeated candidate is in any event, better suited to being a novelist. Although the political chapters are intelligent, they are cold. The biographical chapters are not exactly warm (a tender heart has never been Vargas Llosa's strongest characteristic, despite his early and continuing admiration for Hugo). Still, you plunge into reading about Uncle Lucho and Aunt Julia and military school, and somehow—this is the great mystery of literature—you feel the same eager fascination of a young boy hiding from his teachers in order to read about d'Artagnan and the Count of Monte Cristo.