The Discreet Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
Faber & Faber, 326pp, £20
The citation accompanying the Nobel Prize in Literature doesn’t always supply an aid to judgement. The novels that Saul Bellow published after 1976 lived up to his citation – displaying “human understanding” and a “subtle analysis of contemporary culture” – without being especially distinguished. Everything written by Imre Kertész, his worst books no less than his best, is likely to uphold “the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”. But you would be hard-pressed to find more damning testimony against Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Discreet Hero, a truer barometer of its failure, than the committee’s praise in 2010 for his “cartography of structures of power” and “trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat”. It’s a description that this novel misses by a mile – and not because the acts of resistance and revolt culminate, for once, in victory.
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