História de Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Down the Peruvian Rabbit Hole

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, the book's English title, is not about reality nor is it biographical nor, as its Spanish title might suggest, is it a history. It is a novel that contradicts its own fictional intent by denying everything about itself. It's Jorge Luis Borges confessing that he didn't mean any of his Fictions. It's Paul of Tarsus repudiating all his repudiations of Judaism. In short, it's a story of paradox presented so the reader can't escape its presence as literature.

Alejandro Mayta never existed; and he never had a schoolboy relationship with the author. None of the various interviews conducted by the author is authentic because all of the subjects are also fictional. That they give inconsistent and contradictory responses about Mayta, his character, and his activities is down solely to the author's whimsy. The revolutionary events in which Mayta was involved never happened; nor did their aftermath as part of the history of Peru. After admitting these facts, the author then goes on to interview the 'real' Alejandro Mayta, who has no more existence than his first fictional incarnation.

The technique Vargas Llosa uses is not unlike that of Alice in Wonderland: absurdity asking for a suspension of judgment. In Alice, the reason is to demonstrate the illogicality of several linguistic theories disapproved of by Lewis Carrol. My guess is that Vargas Llosa has a similar intent in a Drink Me, Eat Me sequence that the reader is force-fed.

Much is mocked as absurd by Vargas Llosa, with about as much entertainment value, if substantially less comedy, as in Alice. Revolutionaries are rather dim-witted adolescents. Old revolutionaries are even more dim-witted and they lie even more than adolescents. Novelists can't distinguish between fact and fiction; and even if they can they prefer to lie as a matter of principle. Those on the bottom of the social ladder have been there for a very long time and are more or less habituated to a life of ugliness and filth. Revolution, particularly Marxist-inspired revolution, doesn't do much to change this condition, except to increase the general level of paranoia. Historians, like reporters, are little more than collectors of gossip.

Alejandro Mayta begins and ends in a garbage dump. In between is mostly metaphorical waste and disorder which increases progressively as the essential fact of modern Peruvian history. It is unclear if this is meant seriously or ironically by Vargas Llosa. If the former, then his tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the country's invasion by Cuban and Bolivian troops, who are repulsed by U.S. Marines, doesn't make sense. If the latter, then his constant realistic references to Peruvian racism, poverty and inequality don't make sense. The apparent intent is to sketch a sort of drear dystopia that somehow continues to function while its entire population slowly starves to death.

The one thing that is clear is that no one is content in Vargas Llosa's Peru. The ruling class is continuously threatened with homicide and a lack of decent coffee. The middle classes, particularly lawyers, can't continue living comfortably and are moving to Mexico. The poor, if they can, get off by bus to Venezuela; if they can't, they end up in a rapidly expanding Lima slum, probably in the cocaine trade. The mountain Indians live in a parallel universe buffered by coca leaves. The revolutionaries of the far right and the far left spend their time killing one another off in the shanty towns, mountains and jungles.

Some reviewers read Alejandro Mayta as a novel of hope. That it was written at all is, I suppose, a sign of such hope. A bit like planting a garden perhaps. But there is certainly nothing in the novel itself that suggests the possibility of a better future for any of its cast of characters. They are all doomed to remain down the rabbit hole forever.

Nonetheless, it is an awfully good read.

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