The Discreet Hero
By Mario Vargas Llosa, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pages, $26
“When Piura was a poor city, these things didn’t happen,” shrugs the sergeant in Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, set entirely in his native Peru. Businessman Felicito, the recipient of a series of menacing letters from extortionists, has every reason to feel alarm at that shrug. In spite of the dire warnings of what will befall him if he does so, Felicito has reported the letters, naively trusting that the cops are going to help him.
Felicito’s civic-minded, unshowy courage helps explain the title of the “The Discreet Hero”, and serves as a good example of the parallels woven into its plot. For, like the city of Piura, Don Felicito himself was once poor and, after years of gruelling work, has built up a profitable coach company. The essential, mystery ingredient propelling the plot — who are the extortioners? — is underpinned by a particularly Latin-American preoccupation that has absorbed Vargas Llosa across his long writing career: in the face of thuggishness, can the rule of law ever prevail?
Switching between Piura, Peru’s fifth city, and its capital, Lima, this is Vargas Llosa’s second novel since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Although a pale shadow of his earlier triumphs, it offers interesting insights into the new, consumerist Peru coexisting with the superstition and grinding poverty of the old.
This hybridity suffuses Edith Grossman’s translation. Sandy scrubland near a gleaming commercial centre is scattered with “sparse carob trees ... where fast-moving lizards peered all around with their triangular heads and gummy eyes”. Elsewhere, holy women, witches and the Christian cult of the Captive Lord of Ayabaca jar alongside references to multiscreen cinemas and Justin Bieber.
“The Discreet Hero” begins, promisingly enough, with an epigraph from a text by Jorge Luis Borges: “Our beautiful task is to imagine there is a labyrinth and a thread.” For much of the story, the thread is intriguingly elusive. In provincial Piura, decent Don Felicito will endure the burning down of his coach business and the kidnapping of his girlfriend, while Sergeant Lituma must puzzle out why the extortioners always sign their letters with a drawing of a spider. Meanwhile, in Lima, Don Rigoberto, a wealthy insurance executive, faces growing intimidation after witnessing the marriage between his elderly boss and his maid.
It is only at the story’s three-quarter point that the thread linking the two lives, two cities and two ends of the social scale elegantly emerges. Vargas Llosa aficionados will, by then, have spotted the recurrence of his favourite classical mythemes: the notion of plot as a labyrinth, for instance, or the “weaver” figures of Arachne and Ariadne, who moved in disguise through earlier novels and are evoked here by the spider drawings.
“The Discreet Hero” also reanimates Vargas Llosa’s own homespun mythologies. Sergeant Lituma, now plumper and sweatier, is the same, roguish “Lituma of The Green House” (1966) and “Death in the Andes” (1993). Don Rigoberto is the same big-eared, art-loving businessman whose wife’s erotic escapades featured in “In Praise of the Stepmother” (1988).
Flashes of strangeness enliven a novel that sometimes teeters on the pedestrian. In a subplot to the story of Don Rigoberto, for example, his teenage son is regularly approached in the street by a mysterious, weeping man. Is he devil or angel? Or is Rigoberto’s son making the whole thing up? In another interesting scene, Don Rigoberto and his wife whisper erotic stories in bed. Improvising, interpolating, then urging each other to get back to “the point”, their teasing out the thread of narrative pleasure reads like a commentary on the novelist’s art itself.
That Vargas Llosa has excelled in this art is, of course, not in doubt. His technique of superimposing a conversation about an event on to a simultaneous description of the event itself was used to stunning, cubist effect in earlier tales. It occasionally enthrals here but his flair for structure cannot dispel the weariness in his writing. It is as if he has sunk all his energies into making an ingenious cabinet, with little in the way of verbal wonders to fill it.
Rather than conveying the pleasure of precise observation, we are too often treated to general, bullet-point descriptions. The bustle of the Peruvian street is a list of modes of transport. Sergeant Lituma’s meal in a Chinese restaurant is an overlong inventory of standard, crispy-fried dishes.
Elsewhere, two-dimensional characters diminish the credibility of the plot. The disinherited sons of Don Rigoberto’s newly married friend are little more than cartoon gangsters. It is all a far cry from the subtle dissection of political violence in Vargas Llosa’s 2000 novel “The Feast of the Goat”.
Will Vargas Llosa return to form? One day, maybe. But for now, though it has pressed some old characters into new service, “The Discreet Hero” does not mark a comeback for its writer.
–Financial Times
