The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Making Waves: Essays by Mario Vargas Llosa
Kent D. Wolf

Mario Vargas Llosa. Making Waves: Essays. Trans. John King. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 338 pp. $27.50.

Author, journalist, literary critic, playwright, filmmaker, presidential candidate. Mario Vargas Llosa is a jack-of-all-trades. Collected here—many for the first time in English—are four decades of newspaper editorials, political commentary, and film and literary criticism by an author who earned his place in the arena of world literature as a major figure in the Boom of the Latin American novel in the 1960s. Making Waves is a fine chronicle of Vargas Llosa’s artistic and political development, and one can sense the evolution of his ideology in these pages. Like many of his contemporaries, the Peruvian writer was a fervent supporter of Castro in the 1960s. The early writings in this collection reflect that passion: “[T]he hour of social justice will arrive in countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it.” With the exile of Cuban authors in the 1970s, Vargas Llosa moved closer to a break with Castro and writers still in support of the communist leader—a break exacerbated by a fistfight with Gabriel García Márquez in a Mexico City movie theater.
Making Waves showcases Vargas Llosa’s thoughts on the vocation of the writer and the role of literature as well. Once a Sartrean existentialist, Vargas Llosa was soon drawn to Flaubert. The use of personal experience as raw material aided him in his quest for critical realism. For Vargas Llosa, a writer is a slave to his vocation, a position that allows one to express “a terrible indictment against existence under whatever regime or ideology.” In a lecture given on receipt of the Rómulo Gallegos prize, he advised, “Warn them that literature is fire, that it means nonconformity and rebellion, that the raison d’ être of a writer is protest, disagreement and criticism.” A blend of sharp-eyed analysis and personally committed criticism, Making Waves is a truly rich work by a major international writer. [Kent D. Wolf]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Making Waves: Essays by Mario Vargas Llosa Kent D. Wolf Mario Vargas Llosa. Making Waves: Essays. Trans. John King. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 338 pp. $27.50. Author, journalist, literary critic, playwright, filmmaker, presidential candidate. Mario Vargas Llosa is a jack-of-all-trades. Collected here—many for the first time in English—are four decades of newspaper editorials, political commentary, and film and literary criticism by an author who earned his place in the arena of world literature as a major figure in the Boom of the Latin American novel in the 1960s. Making Waves is a fine chronicle of Vargas Llosa’s artistic and political development, and one can sense the evolution of his ideology in these pages. Like many of his contemporaries, the Peruvian writer was a fervent supporter of Castro in the 1960s. The early writings in this collection reflect that passion: “[T]he hour of social justice will arrive in countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it.” With the exile of Cuban authors in the 1970s, Vargas Llosa moved closer to a break with Castro and writers still in support of the communist leader—a break exacerbated by a fistfight with Gabriel García Márquez in a Mexico City movie theater. Making Waves showcases Vargas Llosa’s thoughts on the vocation of the writer and the role of literature as well. Once a Sartrean existentialist, Vargas Llosa was soon drawn to Flaubert. The use of personal experience as raw material aided him in his quest for critical realism. For Vargas Llosa, a writer is a slave to his vocation, a position that allows one to express “a terrible indictment against existence under whatever regime or ideology.” In a lecture given on receipt of the Rómulo Gallegos prize, he advised, “Warn them that literature is fire, that it means nonconformity and rebellion, that the raison d’ être of a writer is protest, disagreement and criticism.” A blend of sharp-eyed analysis and personally committed criticism, Making Waves is a truly rich work by a major international writer. [Kent D. Wolf]

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