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??? COHPAnATIST most current theoretical discourse on race and gender without permitting the text to become overladen with theory. While the repetition ofthemes and summary of his argument at the opening ofeach part in one sense make it sound almost like a series oflectures, the work overall is a particularly interesting model for advanced undergraduate and graduate students looking for insight into various approaches to comparative analysis. His sophisticated yet lucid presentation ofthe material, combined with the excellent notes and bibliography, make this study valuable to the novice and scholar alike. It is a compelling, well-crafted comparative model that lends itself to adaptation to cross-cultural studies of other writers but will be difficult to equal. Carolyn R. HodgesTAe University ofTennessee, Knoxville MARIO VARGAS LLOSA. Making Waves. Ed. and trans. John King. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. xxi + 330 pp. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, has been a transatlantic man ofletters for at least a generation; this sizable collection offorty-six essays is a representative sampling ofhis critical work over the last thirty-five years. It is not hisfirst collection (despite a statement to this effect on thejacket), because he has published at least four volumes of essays in Spanish since 1986 (usually through Editorial Seix Barrai in Barcelona). To be correct, one should note that it is his first substantial critical work translated into English aside from The Perpetual Orgy (1986), a brilliant study ofFlaubert, and A Writer 's Reality (1 991), his lectures on his own novels. Six ofthe essays in Making Waves appeared in La verdad de las mentiras: ensayos sobre literatura (The Truth ofLies: Essays on Literature, 1990), and they are among the finest critical pieces that he has written, poiningt toward certain literary allegiances that he has held for many years. La verdad de las mentiras would be worth translating in its entirety. It contains twenty-six essays, mostly on wellknown novels, including several in English: Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, The Tropic ofCancer, The Power and the Glory, Lolita, and Herzog. Vargas Llosa moves with ease among writers in English and French as well as Spanish, and he can be recommended as a critic to comparatists in the field ofmodern fiction. John King, the editor ofMaking Waves, is well aware that Vargas Llosa is also a man who has been involved in public life, and not just the public life of Peru. Accordingly he has often chosen essays that deal with political as well as literary ideas; the effect of the collection is that of an intellectual biography. As a very young man Vargas Llosa went from Lima to Franco's Madrid, where he spent a year as a graduate student in literature; this was in 1958. Many years later he wrote a short piece, "When Madrid was a Village," that charmingly evokes this period of his youth. He then lived for six years in the Paris ofSartre and Camus while working for the Spanish broadcasting service of Radio-Télévision Française. This is where he finished his first important novels, La ciudady losperros and La casa verde. At an early stage in his career he became an expatriate writer for various reasons, private and political, and in 1968 he defended his position in an essay called "Literature and Exile," written in London. By this time he would have been acquainted with the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, who lived most ofthe time in Paris, and the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, already in exile from Castro's regime, which he had originally supported, and now resident in London. VcH. 23 (1999): 181 REVIEWS One could write an interesting comparative study ofthese two Latinos in London, both devoted to James Joyce but in quite different ways. Cabrera Infante, author of Tres Tristes Tigres and Infante 's Inferno, delights in Finnegans Wake, whereas Vargas Llosa, in his fine essay on Joyce's Dubliners (included in Making Waves), makes this observation: "He is one ofa very small number ofcontemporary authors who have been able to endow the middle class—an unheroic classpar excellence— with an heroic aura and with an outstanding artistic personality; in this, he is once more following the...

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