Wellsprings »

Mario Vargas Llosa’s many novels include The Feast of the Goat, The Storyteller, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and, most recently, The Bad Girl. In 2006 he presented the Richard A. Ellmann lectures at Emory University, entitled “Three Masters,” which were adapted for this volume.

When a master novelist, essayist, and critic searches for the wellsprings of his own work, where does he turn? Mario Vargas Llosa—Peruvian writer, presidential contender, and public intellectual—answers this most personal question with elegant concision in this collection of essays. In “Four Centuries of Don Quixote,” he revisits the quintessential Spanish novel—a fiction about fiction whose ebullient prose still questions the certainties of our stumbling ideals. In recounting his illicit, delicious discovery of Borges’ fiction—“the most important thing to happen to imaginative writing in the Spanish language in modern times”—Vargas Llosa stands in for a generation of Latin American novelists who were liberated from their sense of isolation and inferiority by this Argentinean master of the European tradition.

In a nuanced appreciation of Ortega y Gasset, Vargas Llosa recovers the democratic liberalism of a misunderstood radical—a mid-century political philosopher on a par with Sartre and Russell, ignored because “he was only a Spaniard.” And in essays on the influence of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, the author finds an antidote to the poisonous well of fanaticism in its many modern forms, from socialist utopianism and nationalism to religious fundamentalism. From these essays a picture emerges of a writer for whom the enchantment of literature awakens a critical gaze on the turbulent world in which we live.

The Barnes & Noble Review

This vigorous, high-spirited, wide-ranging survey of personally admired authors hardly limits itself to the literary world. Befitting Mario Vargas Llosa's long and distinguished career as both novelist and statesman, the pieces in this collection cover aspects of all three overlapping worlds postulated by Karl Popper, the philosopher whose works occupy Vargas Llosa's mind in his concluding essay. Carried aloft by Vargas Llosa's pellucid prose -- his esteem for the fabled clarity of Ortega y Gasset is an internalized and externalized grail -- the reader is treated to sharp and wise observations on "the world of natural and material objects; the subjective and private world of the individual mind; and the world of cultural creativity." Vargas Llosa's praise for Isaiah Berlin's work might equally be applied to his own: "Each essay in this magisterial work reads like a chapter of a novel whose action takes place in a world of thought and in which the heroes and villains are ideas." Whether examining the cosmopolitan erudition of Borges, the fantastical conceits of Cervantes, the fallacies and dangers of nationalism, or the half-mythic origins of his native Peru, the author provides immense delights in the form of spot-on metaphors, striking aphorisms, and valuable historical and sociological insights: "The most remarkable aspect of the [Incan] civilization [is that] it managed to eradicate hunger in that immense region." Ultimately, these essays trumpet the supreme value of fiction: as a bulwark against the dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and disenchantment engendered by the exigencies of existence. --Paul DiFilippo

Four Centuries of Don Quixote     1
The Fictions of Borges     26
Ortega y Gasset and the Revival of a Liberal     47
The Challenge of Nationalism     70
Fiction and Reality in Latin America     109
Isaiah Berlin, a Hero of Our Time     133
Updating Karl Popper     160
Acknowledgments     201