Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness to The Tin Drum and Herzog and major works by Hemingway, Woolf, Orwell, Camus and Nabokov. There are long studies of George Grosz, vignettes on Botero and Picasso, and an appreciation of Cezanne and Van Gogh, including a visit to Cezanne's homes in the South Seas. Also included are essays on political and social thinkers, from the nineteenth-century feminist, Flora Tristan, to Isaiah Berlin, and contemporary pieces on 9/11, the aftermath of the war in Iraq, and the terrorist attacks on London and Madrid. Fantastically intelligent, inspired and surprising, Touchstones is a landmark collection from one of the world's leading intellectuals.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Literary Criticism, Politics, Nobel Prize

Hardcover

First published December 1, 2007

About the author

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the Spanish language and Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969/1975). He wrote prolifically across various literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. He won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award. Several of his works have been adopted as feature films, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982). Vargas Llosa's perception of Peruvian society and his experiences as a native Peruvian influenced many of his works. Increasingly, he expanded his range and tackled themes from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa criticized nationalism in different parts of the world.
Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was politically active. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and later identified as a liberal and held anti-left-wing ideas. He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democrático coalition, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide.
Vargas Llosa continued his literary career while advocating for right-wing activists and candidates internationally following his exit from direct participation in Peruvian politics. He was awarded the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes International Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2011, Vargas Llosa was made the Marquess of Vargas Llosa by Spanish king Juan Carlos I. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie française.

Reviews

[Farhan Khalid · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fiction of my Bolivian childhood are more vivid in my memory than flesh-and-blood people

Memory is decisive proof

Every writer is firstly a reader

I am a flagrant literary parasite

Everything I have invented as a writer has its roots in lived experience

Influence is a dangerous word

Don Quixote is an attempt to make the myth a reality, to transform fiction into living history

Don Quixote does not change - he repeats himself

What does change are his surroundings, the people around him, and reality itself

Don Quixote is a song of freedom

[Mrs Dalloway] narrated from the mind of one of the characters, that subtle and impalpable reality life becomes impression, enjoyment, suffering, memory

A novel must free itself from real reality, convince the reader that it is a different reality, with its own laws, time, myths and other characteristics

'Tropic of Cancer' is chaos in pure form

[The Stranger] Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of human heart saying more than one feels

We all do it, every day, to make life simpler

Meursault doesn't want to make life simpler

Fake feelings guarantee social coexistence

What is most terrifying about him is his indifference to others

He is an outsider in a radical sense

This is a classic motif in Hemingway's fictions: a man is caught up in a fight to the finish with an implacable adversary

Lolita can be read as a baroque and subtle substitute for existence

Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences

We experience life through fictions

Marcel Proust: True life, life at last clarified and brought to light, the only life, furthermore, that is fully lived, is literature

All good literature asks radical questions of the world we live in

Literature has nothing to say to those people who are satisfied with their lot

Literature offers sustenance to rebellious and non-conformist spirits

Van Gogh declared himself an out-and-out realist and looked to set up his easel in the open air

Gauguin maintained that the true raw material of a creator was not reality but memory, and that one should look for inspiration not in the world outside but rather from within

Paradise is not of this world and those who set out to look for it or construct it here are irremediably condemned to failure

[Mujahid Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mario Vargas Llosa's prose in this collection of essays is a poetic in every sense of the word. What do the essays on literature tell us about the recurrent concerns of Vargas Llosa the writer? In ‘Seed of Dreams’, he points out that every writer is first of all a reader, and that being a writer is a different way of continuing to read. His first childhood attempts at literature were rewritings of stories that he had heard or read. As a writer, therefore, he is a ‘flagrant literary parasite’, rewriting, amending or correcting other works of literature. In addition, everything he has invented as a writer, he argues, has its roots in lived experience: ‘It was something that I saw, heard, but also read, that my memory retained with a singular and mysterious stubbornness, that formed certain images which, sooner or later, and for reasons that I also find very difficult to fathom, became a stimulus for fantasy, a starting point for a complete imaginary construction’. While literary influence is seen as a largely unconscious process, Vargas Llosa is clear that the greatest influence on his work was William Faulkner: ‘It was thanks to the Yoknapatawpha saga that I discovered the prime importance of form in fiction and the infinite possibilities offered by point of view and the construction of time in a story’.

Must read for aficionados of literature especially the literature that sprang up from Latin America.

[Bryan Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wealth of erudition in clear, flowing prose. This set of short essays will always be worth re-reading.

[Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful! What a lucid and coherent mind, Vargas Llosa’s reviews of other writers make you want to read them all. He has introduced me to some I didn't know and made me reflect in a new way about some I already knew and read. His political essays made me go: yes! yes! yes! And not only because we share the same world views, but because he expresses those views in such a clear and logical way.

To be read and reread.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection of essays, thoroughly engaging from start to finish. This book is worth the price of admission for the Iraq Diary alone, and in general I found myself enjoying the political content much more than I expected to. An excellent companion to Vargas Llosa's fiction.

[Lindsey Lang]

the final book in my surprise group win today! this one my hubby's interested in too so that really works out!

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m never sure what to expect from a collection of essays, especially one that spans as many years and topics as this one. However, having read and enjoyed “Archaic utopia” and “The Temptation of the Impossible” (two works of non-fiction literary analysis) by him, I was curious to read more of his non-fiction work. Once again I found his ability to decode the structure of novels invaluable. His emphasis on the importance of the construction of the narrator was just wonderful, as was his ability to elucidate some of the world’s classics. I was slightly more afraid of his political essays as I had heard that he had a right-wing bias but I was delighted to find it almost completely absent. In these essays his past as a journalist came clearly through but with the addition of the commentary of someone who has seen his fair share of the world and read even more. Overall I quite enjoyed this collection, apart from a few pieces on art on subjects that did not interest me.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays on art and literature are entertaining and informative and the essays on politics show Vargas Llosa to be an unredeemed liberal globalist, though without the obnoxious virtue-signalling and with much more common sense than is normally found in that breed.

[Calvin Gleeson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, insightful commentary on some well known and also lesser well known works of literature. You may enjoy the critical essays about artists and politicians too.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The literary reviews in this collection are enjoyable, I always find it interesting to read others interpretation and viewpoints on authors and books, and here Vargas Llosa is at his best. For the first 100 pages, this gets my recommendation.

The other 2 sections containing some essays on art, politics and ideology are more biographical, which are OK and informative, but were not something that held my attention or made me want to read them in a hurry (yes, this book really did take me a quarter of a year to finish). It was OK.