Making Waves: Essays

Mario Vargas Llosa, renowned as a novelist, is one of our most brilliant and provocative public intellectuals as well. In "Making Waves," the first collection of his essays, he explores, with characteristic brio and elegance, his long-standing preoccupations - literature and politics, Europe and the Americas, and the relations among them all. We follow Vargas Llosa from his native Peru to Madrid and then to Paris, the setting of essays on his great precursors Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, as well as a comic account of his visit to the tomb of Rin Tin Tin and an affecting memoir of his time in the city as an aspiring writer in the 1960s. In passionately critical essays on the Cuban revolution and its aftermath, Vargas Llosa takes up vital questions of Latin American independence, while in essays on Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar - and in an exchange with Gunter Grass - he ponders magic realism. In more recent articles, he considers the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path and the presidency of Alberto Fujimori - and the failures of the English public-school system, which made his son into a Rastafarian. The essays in "Making Waves" are full of Mario Vargas Llosa's unflagging literary intensity and moral and political integrity. They are an important addition to the body of work of this major international writer.