Vargas Llosa

Yesterday, I read three books by Vargas Llosa, only one of which I liked. The first was Captain Pantoja, a very skillful satirical novel; the second was the famous Conversation in the Cathedral, which started out with a bang but didn't sustain my interest; and the third was The True Life of Alexander Mayta, which I did like, about a communist revolutionary. This last book was also very skillful, told by a journalist writing Mayta's life, complete with the nuns turned Communists, the general suggesting the book shouldn't be written, and finally Mayta himself, who is now only interested in going to work in the well-paid oil platforms of the neighboring country. Excellent.

Vargas Llosa wrote an unusually wide range of novels, but quite a few political novels, I'm now discovering.

I have three books on the go: one on film theory, one by Francois de Sales on spirituality; and an excellent on about Simon Bolivares by Garcia Marquez. This last book is in the great tradition of The Death of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar and all those novels about Alexander the Great, imagining what the great general was like in his last years.