The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa

When Mario Vargas Llosa announced in October 2023 that his new novel, Le dedico mi silencio—now published in English as I Give You My Silence—would be his last, I was intrigued by what that farewell to fiction might involve. How would this prodigious author of eighteen other novels—among them the most adventuresome in the Latin American literary canon—conclude his career? (He died in April 2025 at the age of eighty-nine.)I had been enthused by The Feast of the Goat (2000), his antidictatorial tour de force, but disappointed by the six subsequent novels, which lacked, I thought, his inventiveness and stylistic brilliance.1 Refreshingly, his swan song, albeit a minor achievement compared to the exceptional works of his younger years, is charming and thought-provoking, again addressing the dilemma of Peru’s identity that he had pursued since The Time of the Hero (1963), his groundbreaking first novel. If Balzac is right (and Vargas Llosa has insisted that he is) that “the novel is the private history of nations,” then how to write about a heterogenous Latin American country that has the extraordinary privilege of not having an identity, “because it has all of them”? This is an idea he...