Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist, nonfiction writer, dramatist, and literary critic, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Llosa was also the recipient of multiple and diverse awards granted by around fifteen countries. He wrote more than twenty works of fiction over a sixty-year period including A Fish in the Water, The Language of Passion, The Temptation of the Impossible, Wellsprings, and The War of the End of the World which critics consider an essential work in the western canon.
Llosa published Letters to a Young Novelist in 1997 in Spanish, then translated and published it in English in 2002. The short book (about 135 pages) contains twelve sections and an index. Llosa addresses the letters to an unknown young writer, “Dear friend,” who aspires to be a successful novelist. Llosa’s voice throughout is that of an encouraging older sage. He ends each letter with the familiar valediction, “Fondly.”
In the first section, “The Parable of the Tape Worm,” Llosa compares the urge to write professionally to the invasion of a worm deep in the writer’s body and soul.
In the second chapter, Llosa borrows the image of “The Catoblepas” to describe the novelist. Pliny described the mythological African creature as having a head so heavy it must look toward the ground. But the catoblepas is dangerous because its stare, if it happens to look up, can kill. Llosa uses the image to portray how he believes novelists look to their own past experiences and their interior demons to construct their literary works.
Llosa’s chapter on “The Power of Persuasion,” discusses the inextricable relationship of form and content. Saying “…the story a novel tells is inseparable from the way it is told.” Such a novel exhibits “the power of persuasion.” He emphasizes that “Good novels—great ones—never actually tell us anything; rather they make us live it and share in it by virtue of their persuasive powers.”
Llosa’s chapter on “Style” is revelatory. He eliminates the idea of “correctness,” saying “…what matters is that it [the style] be efficient or suited to its task, which is to endow the stories it tells with the illusion of life, real life.” This sentence struck me because I had just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger. In this novel, McCarthy wrote without punctuation in, for example, contracted words. Thus, he writes “dont” for don’t. I found the style aggravating at first but adjusted to it. Llosa goes on to emphasize that the success of a novelist’s style depends on “its internal coherence and its essentiality,” giving Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses as an example.
A long discussion ensues in the chapter “The Narrator and Narrative Space.” Llosa begins by commenting that the works of fiction that dazzle the reader do so because “the magic of their prose and the dexterity of their construction” create an illusion. He discusses how the elements of the novel are constructed and how the novelist uses specific techniques: the narrator, space, time, and the level of reality. His description of the narrator is “a being made of words and not of flesh and blood.” Thus, he distinguishes between the narrator and the author. He points out that the first problem an author must resolve is “Who will tell the story?” He goes through a lengthy discussion of the attributes and weaknesses of the first, second, and third-person narrator. He ends by stating that “The shifts in point of view can enrich a story, give it depth…or can smother and crush it…” This chapter is the best explanation of how to use the narrative voice that I have read.
“Time” in novels is the subject of the next chapter. Llosa begins by dispelling the naïve distinction between “real time” (the chronological time inhabited by writers and readers) and “fictional time” (the imaginary time the narrator and characters are trapped in) and what he calls “the temporal point of view” of the novel form. He goes on to demonstrate different authors’ varied uses of time. Llosa defines “the temporal point of view” as “the relationship that exists in all novels between the time the narrator inhabits and the time of what is being narrated.”
After delineating his presentation of the two points of view just presented—spatial and temporal, Llosa tackles a more difficult subject that he terms “Levels of Reality.” He defines “levels of reality as “the relationship between the level, or plane, of reality on which the narrator situates himself to narrate the novel and the plane of reality on which the story takes place.” Although there exist multiple planes, he goes on to lay out the recognizable differences between two that are distinct: “realism” and “fantasy.” After discussing several authors’ works, Llosa concludes that authors’ uses of “levels of reality” often define their originality.
In “Shifts and Qualitative Leaps,” Llosa describes how some novelists use alterations or shifts in any of the three points of view—spatial, temporal, or level of reality—as they tell their story. His view of effective spatial shifts is that they give “a broad, variegated, even global and totalizing vision of a story.” He cites Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and James Joyce’s Ulysses as examples. The example he gives of a temporal shift, The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, shifts from a realist to an imaginary, ethereal, spiritual plane. Llosa suggests that shifts in levels of reality give authors an opportunity to create complex or original work. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando uses a shift of character from man to woman which Llosa calls a “crux or central upheaval in the body of the narrative.” Llosa concludes that shifts in and of themselves do not indicate anything and their success or failure depends upon the ability of the writer to strengthen the novel’s power of persuasion.
“Chinese Boxes” includes a discussion of novels that contain nested stories, such as Scheherazade told in The Thousand and One Nights. Llosa explains that this narrative technique fits stories inside of stories through narrative shifts in time, space, and the level of reality. He also demonstrates that Cervantes used such shifts in Don Quixote. The chapter ends with Llosa explaining how a contemporary novel, A Brief Life by Juan Carlos Onetti uses the Chinese box or nested storyline very effectively.
In the next chapter “The Hidden Fact,” Llosa discusses how some successful novelists, such as Hemingway, use a narrative technique in which a crucial element of the story is simply left out or not explained, allowing readers “to fill in the blanks with their own hypotheses and conjectures.” He explains how Hemingway used the technique of “narration by omission” in both The Old Man and the Sea and in The Sun Also Rises. He also describes how Robbe-Grillet used the hidden fact technique in Jealousy and Faulkner used it in Sanctuary. Llosa also delights in sharing that a book he keeps by his bedside, one dating back to the days of chivalry, Tirant Lo Blanc by Joanot Martorel is an exquisite example of the nested story.
In his last, short chapter, “Communicating Vessels,” Llosa discusses novels that use parallel stories which may be from contrasting times or cultures yet seem to float and interact with each other. He mentions Flaubert’s scene contrasting the fair with the love scene between Emma and her suitor. He explains that what makes it work is that the two episodes “communicate with each other.” Using Cortazar’s novel, The Idol of the Cyclades, he shows how “linking two different times and cultures in a narrative unity, the communicating vessels of both stories cause a new reality to be born.”
In the final short postscript, “By the Way of a P.S.” Mario Vargas Llosa suggests to the recipient of his letters that despite the general interest in books on writing, “…you should forget everything you’ve read in my letters…and just sit down and write.”
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist is a jewel of a book on writing. My suggestion is to sit down and write but also to sit down and read this book carefully. Llosa does an excellent job of unlocking the keys to understanding the use of the narrator, space, time, and the level of reality in the novelist form.
My Writing Goals for 2023
Publish my second book of poetry:
Over the past month, we worked to acquire endorsements for this book. I also worked on marketing material.
Finish, request feedback, and send my first novel out for review:
During this past month, my critique group gave me feedback on this novel.
Continue to work on my other novels:
I have not had time to devote to either one this month.
Continue to develop a network of kindred spirits in the world of writing and publishing:
Boulder Writers Alliance: I attended Gary Alan McBride’s Writers Who Read in person for an invigorating discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris. And I also offered a BWA Poetry Circle.
Denver Woman’s Press Club: I attended a talk by Sandra Dallas, an award-winning novelist whose last book, Where Coyotes Howl, came out this year. Her talk addressed how to arrange your writing life to support your success. Dallas, who is in her eighties, just signed a contract to have two more books published.
Women Writing the West: In September, my critique group’s comments on my work included: “I’ve read enough that I am starting to get a sense of the whole story arc. My mind is ordering it up in a way. I can see the beginning, the middle, and the end,” and “Sometimes you present the solution to a problem that I didn’t know existed. Then you move through the solution. You need to have more conflict and emotions. If you show the reader that, then the reader feels it.”
Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers: I read the newsletter and watched postings of the Colorado Gold Conference on Facebook.
Document my writing progress through my blog and post it on the seventh day of each month, one blog per month in 2022:
Today is October 7, 2023, and I am posting my tenth blog of 2023. September produced threatening weather around the globe, even in my area. October is off to a good start so far here—the pumpkins are starting to move from the fields to neighbors’ doorsteps. Since the squirrels like to eat them, I keep mine indoors until Halloween.
Today in History
Amiri Baraka (Everett LeRoi Jones) was born on October 7, 1934, and died on January 9, 2014. A poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, Baraka received the Pen/Falkner Award, the Langston Hughes Award, and the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama.
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