9 - The Return of the Grand Design: La Fiesta del Chivo (2000), El Paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) and El sueño del celta (2010)

Summary

Despite the interesting and varied nature of Vargas Llosa's experimentation with different novelistic genres, none of the works discussed in chapter 7 can compare with La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World], his central novel of 1981 which best embodies what he calls his ‘totalizing ambition’, the will to confront a complex reality with its fictional recreation on an equally grand scale. The publication of La Fiesta del Chivo [The Feast of the Goat] twenty years later marked a return to the project of the total novel, followed in 2003 by El Paraíso en la otra esquina [The Way to Paradise] and El sueño del celta [The Dream of the Celt] in 2010, all ambitious novels which turn the reality of historical events and personalities into a fictional creation that goes far beyond the portrayal of an epoch or an individual, exploring human nature, ambitions and contradictions in a social context. Comparable to La guerra, these three novels required extensive research, as they are not, or only partly, set in Peru and not directly rooted in Vargas Llosa's personal experience. In order to base his inventions on facts (‘para mentir con conocimiento de causa’, as the writer-protagonist in Historia de Mayta [The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta] puts it) Vargas Llosa worked through a wide range of historical and literary sources.