TOUCHSTONES: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, ART AND POLITICS By Mario Vargas Llosa, Faber, £15

It is unfortunate that the combination of distinguished novelist and failed politician can sometimes produce a tedious critic and columnist. Those coming to Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest collection of essays (translated by John King) from the self-reflexive virtuosity of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter or the relentlessness of the Feast of the Goat, might find their interest flagging as the ideas, images, tones and allusions begin repeating themselves quite early in this selection, and the writing becomes predictable and prolix. Most of the essays here were published in the Spanish newspaper, El País, through the Nineties until 2006, together with some pieces on 20th-century fiction from another collection, The Truth of Lies (2002). Added on are an extract from Vargas Llosa’s book, The Archaic Utopia (1996), on the Indigenist Peruvian writer and compatriot, José María Arguedas, and several entries from his politically chameleonic Iraq Diary (2003).

This collection begins with Vargas Llosa’s increasing involvement in Peruvian politics in the late Eighties, culminating in his defeat as the Centre-Right presidential candidate to Alberto Fujimori in 1990. (He reads Günter Grass’s Tin Drum between a political debate and a street rally, or at the end of “dangerous days, when stones were hurled and shots were fired”.) Touchstones terminates with the writer first not seeing, and then, in the course of less than a couple of weeks in Iraq after Saddam’s fall, beginning to see “without hesitation” the point of Bush and Blair’s “intervention”. The political chronology structures the self-consciously cosmopolitan sweep of these essays. The value of this selection lies in providing an extensive ‘map of reading’ by which to chart the breadth and complexity of a certain kind of Latin American cultural identity, its relationship not only with Spain, but also with the rest of Europe, and of America, and though somewhat dimly, with Africa.

Vargas Llosa’s range, his robust yet hungry grasp over the whole of the West, is the flowering of what Borges had proclaimed in his landmark lecture of 1951, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, as the neglected birthright of all South Americans: “our tradition is the whole of Western culture...we can take on all the European subjects, take them on without superstition and with an irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate consequences.” And the spirit of Borges haunts these essays. It informs the ways in which the “miracle of reading”, from Vargas Llosa’s earliest years in Cochabamba, Bolivia, provides the seeds for his compulsive absorption in fiction — the mysteriously powerful lies, sovereign worlds and “secret utopias” created by the human imagination out of an abiding discontent with the limits of the real. Reading books and pictures thus becomes the “seed of dreams” and desires. The intensities of reading and writing, as in Keats and Proust, are indistinguishable for Vargas Llosa, who calls himself a “flagrant literary parasite”. To be a writer, therefore, is “also a different way of continuing to read”.

Inseparable from this idea of fiction is the idea of freedom, understood as liberty, in the political sense, shading often into anarchy and rebellion. In a darker psychological and erotic sense, freedom also means Art’s ineffable traffic with the irrational and the demonic, across the entire moral range from good to evil. The third preoccupation in these essays is with the craft of storytelling, with each writer’s invention of a narratorial voice that stands both outside and inside the unfolding fiction, often turning into a “narrator-character” in the process. These preoccupations (none of which is significantly original), together with the vocabulary in which they are elaborated, remain unchanged throughout the period and across the genres and media written about in this volume. Hence, a Borgesian range of reading and viewing does not come, in Vargas Llosa, with a corresponding critical agility, precision and lightness that lent, in the case of that master of gentlemanly concision, a delightful fineness to his invention even of the infinite and the labyrinthine. ‘Borgesian’ is an indispensable word in Vargas Llosa’s critical lexicon. But, as with ‘Kafkaesque’ or ‘Shakespearean’, using it frequently and familiarly does not ensure successful identification with the genius of Borges.

The “vice of reading” (and of visiting exhibitions and galleries) makes Vargas Llosa a promiscuous critic. He begins early with the Bible stories and Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, and then takes on Heart of Darkness, Death in Venice, Mrs Dalloway, Tropic of Cancer, The Outsider, The Old man and the Sea, Lolita, The Tin Drum, André Breton’s Nadja, André Malraux’s La Condition humaine, Karen Blixen’s Seven Gothic Tales and Arguedas’s Deep Rivers. The section on art has a long essay on Georg Grosz (“the saddest man in Europe”) and Nazism, essays on Paul Gauguin and his friendship with Van Gogh, a review of an exhibition of Picasso’s erotica, and a fine piece on Fernando Botero’s pictures of the bullfight. The political pieces discuss nationalism and utopianism (in the work of Isaiah Berlin, “the man who knew too much”), globalization, 9/11, Iraq, post-Fujimori Peru, Pinochet, Chilean democracy and, finally, Gauguin’s French-Peruvian grandmother, Flora Tristán.

Yet, in spite of this vast palette, the best essays are the shortest and the least obviously ‘serious’, on subjects and sensibilities that are profoundly Hispanic. The embodiment of fiction and of near-anarchic freedom is, of course, Cervantes’s great knight whose crazed attempts at “transforming fiction into living history” puts the real world in conflict with a “ceremonious and elegant order of things”. But this order co-exists, in Vargas Llosa’s personal universe, with a baroque-Rabelaisian quality incarnated in the lives, persons and works of the two Pablos, Picasso and Neruda. Picasso is the erotic master, marrying shamelessness to grace, and Neruda, “fat, friendly, gossipy and greedy”, and with his “half opened, tortoise eyes”, is also, as a poet, “an ocean of different seas”. And, inevitably, it is the bullfight that becomes emblematic of the vital contradictions, the “blend of primitive savagery and exquisite refinement”, which create the “dirty beauty” of some of Art’s greatest festivals of death: “There is no rational argument that can justify the cruelty behind this beautiful spectacle, the inhumanity that underlies the indescribable grace, elegance, courage and drama that a great bullfight can achieve.”