A review by rick_williams
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa, Alfred J. Mac Adam

5.0

This is a superb, complex, visceral novel which is as much about the nature of story-telling as about the events and individuals it describes; a failed revolution in Peru. The time frame shifts back and forth, often mid-paragraph, between the novelist’s present day Peru (also in part fictionalised) and the date, a couple of decades earlier, of the action that forms the story. We are told again and again that the narrator is writing a novel, not a biography or history book, and that he is in search of the facts solely so that he can know what he is discarding when he ignores or changes events. But facts are not so easy to come by. Each person’s telling of events is bound up with self-interest, fallible memories, political agendas. Even the narrator, the traditionally objective voice, is perhaps not to be trusted.
One is plunged deep into the action, whether that be lying awake at night with the sounds, heat and smell of Lima, gasping for breath in the altitude of Jauja, or recoiling from the horror of Lurigancho prison. The feeling is a dreamlike juxtaposition of physical immersion in a dysfunctional society with a doomed attempt to change it and a nagging doubt as to what is real and what is not.