TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.075

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 4KB | 66 lines

BOOKS, Page 110

Back in Time


  THE STORYTELLER
  by Mario Vargas Llosa; Translated by Helen Lane
  Farrar, Straus & Giroux/246 pages; $17.95


    The unnamed narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa's ninth novel has
practically everything in common with his creator: age (early 50s),
nationality (Peruvian), occupation (writer). Similarly, the two
share a common cosmopolitanism, having spent large swatches of
their adult lives in Europe. An autobiographical strain has often
appeared in Vargas Llosa's fiction, perhaps most notably and
entertainingly in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982). The
Storyteller captures the author -- and his surrogate -- in a
subdued and ruminative mood.

    The reflections are triggered by a chance encounter.  On a
sabbatical in Italy, reading for a change rather than writing, the
narrator wanders through Florence and comes upon a small gallery
exhibiting photographs from Peru. One of them arrests his
attention. It shows a group of Amazonian Indians arranged in a
circle around a standing figure, who seems to have his audience
enraptured. The spectator recognizes the name of the tribe captured
in the picture: the Machiguengas. He is also convinced he knows the
identity of the mysterious speaker. It must be Saul Zuratas, a
close friend when both were university students in Lima during the
mid-1950s. But how can that possibly be?

    Saul is vividly recollected from the old days: Jewish, with
springy red hair and a purplish birthmark covering the right half
of his face. He is distinguished also by his growing interest in
the tribes of Amazonia and their right to survive. The narrator
recalls provoking his friend on this subject: "Should 16 million
Peruvians renounce the natural resources of three-quarters of their
national territory so that 70 or 80 thousand Indians could quietly
go on shooting at each other with bows and arrows, shrinking heads
and worshipping boa constrictors?" Saul's response is skimpy on
particulars but firm in conviction: "Though we don't understand
their beliefs and some of their customs offend us, we have no right
to kill them off."

    After this amicable standoff, and graduation, the friends part
company. Later, though, the narrator finds himself thinking more
and more about Saul's fascination with so-called primitive people.
He wonders, in particular, about evidence that the besieged
Machiguengas, dispersed into small groups by enemies and harsh
conditions, retain their sense of community through a storyteller
who travels wherever listeners can be found, recounting tribal
legends, history and gossip. Such a person, the determined writer
concludes, amounts to "tangible proof that storytelling can be
something more than mere entertainment."

    Is this simply a literary conceit, the wishful thinking of
someone who has chosen to write in a world that no longer seems to
require his labor? With enormous skill and formal grace, Vargas
Llosa weaves this question through the mystery surrounding the fate
of Saul Zuratas, the former comrade who may have gone backward in
time, toward prehistory, to achieve an authority and integrity lost
to contemporary writers. Unfortunately, the narrator cannot imagine
how Saul could have adapted to such a role: "The rest of the story,
however, confronts me only with darkness, and the harder I try to
see through it, the more impenetrable it becomes." Given this
impasse, The Storyteller seems closer to fact than fiction: a
fascinating tale left incomplete through circumscribed realities.