Scan barcode
A review by gef
Historia de Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa
3.0
As Vargas Llosa tells it in La historia secreta de una novela (1983 ed. Barcelona: Tasquets, 1971), La casa verde resulted from his attempts to weld together two unrelated novels that he was trying to write on alternate days. La tía Julia y el escribidor and Historia de Mayta must have similarly disconnected origins. The first is a joining of the story of Varguitas' romance of his tía Julia, to a story about somebody MVLL knew, possibly in the same period, el escribidor ("the scribbler") of radionovelas. As I recall, neither is essential to the other, & the only connection is that the same young man, Varguitas, is a protagonist in one and an observer in the other.
Mayta is even curiouser in its structure. The author (MVLL's narrators are almost always transparent versions of himself) seems to have conducted a real investigation into the history of a real revolutionary of the late 1950s. He presents his speculative findings (because the research in newpaper archives and interviews of survivors and witnesses leaves many questions still in dispute) through a multilayered veil of fiction. But even the first layer is not completely coherent. He presents himself as a novelist who wants to write a fictitious account of real events, and yet needs to know as exactly as possible what those real events were, as a way, he says - I don't remember the phrases, because he offers this explanation several times to doubting interview prospects - to know how much he is lying. O.k., that may be questionable strategy, but not implausible. But then he presents himself as a former schoolmate of Mayta, and therefore of the same age. This age is never stated more precisely than "cuarentón" at the time of the crucial events, which must be 1958 - Fidel Castro is still in the mountains, shortly before entering Havana. The narrator's quest takes place "now," which seems to be 1983 -- the book came out in 1984 - by which time, to follow the logic of the first premise, both he and Mayta would have to be at least 66. However, the conversations & reflections of the narrator, & his relationship to the people he interviews, seem to be those of a man no older than the real Vargas Llosa, born 1936. How do I know? Well, he doesn't seem to have any personal memories of Perú prior to the events of 1958 - his description of school days with Mayta are generic, could be from any period - nor any acquaintance with any of his interviewees or their contexts that goes back even to that time. A second & more glaring inconsistency is the age of Mayta's tía, 70 when the narrator interviews her. That is, she is barely, if at all, older than Mayta himself, but is supposed to have reared him.
Then there is the author's strange decision to locate the events of 1983 in a fantastically apocalytic Perú, which has been invaded, most implausibly, by a combined Cuban and Bolivian revolutionary force and is then also invaded by U.S. Marines to combat the first invaders, leaving the Peruvian armed forces on the margin and causing great destruction from terrorist attacks and air-raids. Enough social violence was already occurring in Perú in 1983 to make this whole scene completely unnecessary, as well as ridiculously implausible. Worse, it is not fully imagined. We never meet or even see one of those "Marines" (everybody uses the English word) or terrucos, nor is there any attempt to explain how the Cuban-Bolivian revolutionary army could have been formed or how they can defend their bases in Bolivia from air or other attacks - it would be possible to make such a case, I suppose, but what would be the point?
In the course of the novel, MVL slides from one p.o.v. to another, beginning a sentence in the 3rd person, about Mayta, and ending in the 1st, as Mayta, or sometimes in the 1st as himself. The maneuver is tricky but generally successful, but there are places where it didn't make sense. I don't remember just what it was, but I think there are places where Mayta as "I" is saying things that the character could not possibly know.
Then at the end, MVL undoes his whole fiction, by claiming to have met the real prototype, who is now an ex-con and an employee in an ice cream parlor. He confesses to having invented the Perú apocalíptico for no good reason he can explain, and also to have invented - both to strengthen his fictional Mayta's motivations and to explain how he became alienated from his political party on the eve of the revolutionary action - Mayta's homosexuality. This is a very important theme in the development of the character of the fictional Mayta. However, it turns out to be not the case at all of the "real" Mayta, the one he claims to have found and interviewed after writing his whole novel. This "real" Mayta is perhaps more interesting than the fictional one, & although he claims not to be prejudiced, is surprised and a little disgusted by the attribution of homosexuality. He's married with several kids, and knows homosexuals chiefly from having seen them depraved and exploited in Lurigancho prison.
It's about fragmentation, about pulling many different threads and styles and premises together into one work and achieving coherence. Vargas Llosa, for all his brilliance, does not always pull it off. I was moved and amazed by Historia de Mayta, but also disappointed in it as an aesthetic construct. Come to think of it, La ciudad y los perros is also two stories attached to but not integrated into one another. Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the only one of his novels I can think of right now that is fully integrated and coherent, in the same way as GGM's Crónica de una muerte anunciada.
In MVLL, I admire the technical virtuosity, in swift shifts of p.o.v., pacing of actions, and the pitiless descriptions, like lingering close-ups of garbage, or broken lives, or ruined apartments, etc. In Gabriel García Márquez I admire enormously the aesthetic integration he usually manages to achieve, starting from ideas and perceptions just as diverse as MVLL's.
Mayta is even curiouser in its structure. The author (MVLL's narrators are almost always transparent versions of himself) seems to have conducted a real investigation into the history of a real revolutionary of the late 1950s. He presents his speculative findings (because the research in newpaper archives and interviews of survivors and witnesses leaves many questions still in dispute) through a multilayered veil of fiction. But even the first layer is not completely coherent. He presents himself as a novelist who wants to write a fictitious account of real events, and yet needs to know as exactly as possible what those real events were, as a way, he says - I don't remember the phrases, because he offers this explanation several times to doubting interview prospects - to know how much he is lying. O.k., that may be questionable strategy, but not implausible. But then he presents himself as a former schoolmate of Mayta, and therefore of the same age. This age is never stated more precisely than "cuarentón" at the time of the crucial events, which must be 1958 - Fidel Castro is still in the mountains, shortly before entering Havana. The narrator's quest takes place "now," which seems to be 1983 -- the book came out in 1984 - by which time, to follow the logic of the first premise, both he and Mayta would have to be at least 66. However, the conversations & reflections of the narrator, & his relationship to the people he interviews, seem to be those of a man no older than the real Vargas Llosa, born 1936. How do I know? Well, he doesn't seem to have any personal memories of Perú prior to the events of 1958 - his description of school days with Mayta are generic, could be from any period - nor any acquaintance with any of his interviewees or their contexts that goes back even to that time. A second & more glaring inconsistency is the age of Mayta's tía, 70 when the narrator interviews her. That is, she is barely, if at all, older than Mayta himself, but is supposed to have reared him.
Then there is the author's strange decision to locate the events of 1983 in a fantastically apocalytic Perú, which has been invaded, most implausibly, by a combined Cuban and Bolivian revolutionary force and is then also invaded by U.S. Marines to combat the first invaders, leaving the Peruvian armed forces on the margin and causing great destruction from terrorist attacks and air-raids. Enough social violence was already occurring in Perú in 1983 to make this whole scene completely unnecessary, as well as ridiculously implausible. Worse, it is not fully imagined. We never meet or even see one of those "Marines" (everybody uses the English word) or terrucos, nor is there any attempt to explain how the Cuban-Bolivian revolutionary army could have been formed or how they can defend their bases in Bolivia from air or other attacks - it would be possible to make such a case, I suppose, but what would be the point?
In the course of the novel, MVL slides from one p.o.v. to another, beginning a sentence in the 3rd person, about Mayta, and ending in the 1st, as Mayta, or sometimes in the 1st as himself. The maneuver is tricky but generally successful, but there are places where it didn't make sense. I don't remember just what it was, but I think there are places where Mayta as "I" is saying things that the character could not possibly know.
Then at the end, MVL undoes his whole fiction, by claiming to have met the real prototype, who is now an ex-con and an employee in an ice cream parlor. He confesses to having invented the Perú apocalíptico for no good reason he can explain, and also to have invented - both to strengthen his fictional Mayta's motivations and to explain how he became alienated from his political party on the eve of the revolutionary action - Mayta's homosexuality. This is a very important theme in the development of the character of the fictional Mayta. However, it turns out to be not the case at all of the "real" Mayta, the one he claims to have found and interviewed after writing his whole novel. This "real" Mayta is perhaps more interesting than the fictional one, & although he claims not to be prejudiced, is surprised and a little disgusted by the attribution of homosexuality. He's married with several kids, and knows homosexuals chiefly from having seen them depraved and exploited in Lurigancho prison.
It's about fragmentation, about pulling many different threads and styles and premises together into one work and achieving coherence. Vargas Llosa, for all his brilliance, does not always pull it off. I was moved and amazed by Historia de Mayta, but also disappointed in it as an aesthetic construct. Come to think of it, La ciudad y los perros is also two stories attached to but not integrated into one another. Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the only one of his novels I can think of right now that is fully integrated and coherent, in the same way as GGM's Crónica de una muerte anunciada.
In MVLL, I admire the technical virtuosity, in swift shifts of p.o.v., pacing of actions, and the pitiless descriptions, like lingering close-ups of garbage, or broken lives, or ruined apartments, etc. In Gabriel García Márquez I admire enormously the aesthetic integration he usually manages to achieve, starting from ideas and perceptions just as diverse as MVLL's.