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.