The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Mario Vargas Llosa's novel shifts between the disintegrating Peru of the 1980s and a period 25 years before to tell the story of failed revolutionary Alejandro Mayta. It is not a secret that Mayta's quixotic campaign to light a socialist spark failed; that much is clear from the first pages. But Vargas Llosa is able to create suspense to such an extent that as the book approaches its climax the reader is actually willing the revolt in the remote mountain town of Juaja to succeed. Mayta's story is told by a novelist who interviews the surviving principals a quarter-century after the events. Memories are unreliable, but the novelist is not necessarily after the truth. He wants to tell a story. Along the way are astute commentaries on the revolutionary mindset and a devastating portrait of the depths to which Peru had sunk by the mid-1980s, when this novel was published. This is my second go-round with The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. I suspect it will be just as spellbinding when I read it for the third time five years from now.

Fast Company

Jon Bradshaw's Fast Company profiles "six master gamblers" -- as the cover puts it -- in poker, pool, golf and backgammon. But "gambling," meaning playing a game of chance, isn't the best description of what they do. What they do is find an edge and press it. And money is not the objective; it is simply a way of keeping score. The objective is action and defeating an opponent. Bradshaw's style is sharp but completely transparent, allowing the philosophies and personal histories of his subjects to come through at full strength. His account of the Bobby Riggs-Margaret Court match in 1973 is a textbook piece of reportage, from Riggs's strategizing through the nearly shot-by-shot account of the event itself. Everyone remembers Riggs losing to Billie Jean King later that year; Bradshaw lifts this match out of its undeserved obscurity.

The Biggest Game in Town

Al Alvarez is a poet who has also written books on mountain climbing, suicide, and dreams. This depth is why his 1983 book on the World Series of Poker has achieved the status of a classic in its field. Alvarez's interviews add to the players' two dimensions a third of his own. He is not a phony gonzo reporter; he is a sincere, intelligent, interested outsider who writes in a crisp style and who allows his subjects' quotations to run for long paragraphs, even pages. When Alvarez encountered the World Series of Poker, in 1981, it was a much smaller and more freewheeling event than it has since become. It may be nostalgia to think so, but the players of that time seem more philosophical, or at least more capable of expressing an abstract thought, than the crude celebrities who populate the game today.

Vargas Llosa's Nobel

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize in literature is welcome for several reasons. It is, first, a well-deserved honor for a brilliant, sensitive, and meticulous writer. I have read all of Vargas Llosa's novels at least once, and I have yet to find a false or poor sentence. The technique in which he, seemingly effortlessly, interlaces scenes from periods years apart in the same chapter is but one example of his superb craftsmanship. The novels are made like fine Swiss watches.

The prize will also bring Vargas Llosa's work and his thinking on literature to a wider audience. His Nobel lecture, on the importance of fiction and reading, can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/25tkp82. It gives some of his personal history and illuminates the motivations behind his work. Those motivations are at least as old as Virgil, which is why no matter when Vargas Llosa's books are set they all seem timeless.

St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

D.H. Lawrence's nonfiction has impressed me. But if St. Mawr is any indication of the quality of his novels, Evelyn Waugh must have been correct in being bored stiff by them. St. Mawr is a horse, a magnificent horse, a pulsing, living, arrogantly alive creature. That sentence is an approximation of the Lawrentian style, in which everything is said, nothing is hidden, and all emotions are overblown. A woman falls for a horse, finding it a worthier companion than her mewling husband, then heads off for the American Southwest, with the horse, and renounces men altogether to stare at the desert.

In the second half of this volume, The Man Who Died, Lawrence with a straight face has Jesus say, "I am risen!" when he achieves an erection. The story begins wonderfully, in the spare style of Par Lagerqvist, but declines into travesty when Jesus travels to Lebanon and meets a young woman at a temple of Isis. He is still alive after the Crucifixion because, he says, the Romans took him down from the cross too soon. There is a lot of overheated rhetotic amid the intersection of pagan and Hebrew traditions, and Jesus ultimately impregnates the woman and wanders off. What could have been as striking a tale as Anatole France's Thais falls embarrasingly flat. Lawrence got into a lot of trouble with the censors, who found him unredeemably dirty. I am beginning to think they had a point.

Reborn

Susan Sontag's first volume of journals, edited by her son, spans her years from adolescence to her 30s. The entries reveal an incandescent, questing intellect. There is too much fragmentary material to make Reborn consistently engaging, as Max Frisch's notebooks are, for example, but there are vital passages and epigrammic wisdom on subjects like marriage, homosexuality, literature, and philosophy.