Vargas Llosa

It must be credited to J Barry that I discovered not only Vargas Llosa but the entire Boom at his house sometime in late 1993. He had recently been enraptured, as it were, and allowed me to take home a copy of Time of The Hero. Still being a novice, it was shocking, the language crackled with emotion and there is a scene where the cadets take tunrs fucking a chicken. It would be a lie to say that I don't think about that at least once a year. I then bagna spending money like a lunatic, buying as much of the boom as possible. Despite his creeping shift rightward, I always felt Vargas Llosa had the most to say, emulating Flaubert more than frolicking in the reeds of magial realism, or attempting the great synthesis between Old and New a la Don Carlo Fuentes. I find War At The End of the World and Conversations in The Cathederal among the greatest novels of the 20th Century.