The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is my first experience with Mario Vargas Llosa outside of reading some of the transcript of his Nobel address years ago. I wasn’t sure what to expect and my experience definitely had some peaks and valleys of enjoyment, both towards its style and its storyline.
The essential premise of the book runs oddly parallel, in some respects, to the similarly-titled The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov. Both books involve a narrator seeking out the truth of a minor figure’s life, which is told to them second or third hand through others. Where Nabokov is focused on a literary figure, though, Llosa focuses on a young Peruvian revolutionary, Alejandro Mayta, and the lost history of his attempted uprising. In that respect, it’s similar to Ariel Dorfman’s more recent project, The Suicide Museum, where Dorfman tries to find the truth of Salvador Allende’s death. Together, these books form a trinity of engaging alternate and speculative histories.
The distinct highlight of Llosa’s project is the style his writing adopts in order to take on such a project. While initially alienating, the longer I spent with the book, the more impressed I was by the fluidity of Llosa’s prose. The loose use of verb tenses made it so that the past and present emerged simultaneously, sometimes shifting from present to past in alternating paragraphs, or sometimes even within the same paragraph. It gave the novel a kind of dreamy quality that emulated the narrator’s identification with Alejandro Mayta. His identification becomes even more direct when he interviews Mayta’s wife and the use of pronouns also becomes fast and loose, switching between “Mayta,” “he,” and “I” nearly haphazardly, placing the narrator literally in Mayta’s position. Given that the present of the novel involves the U.S. Marines arriving in Peru, the overlaying of past and present creates a poignant parallel and added dimension to the book. While simultaneity cannot quite be achieved in sequential-based text forms, the fact that the time and perspective switches within paragraphs, rather than being presented in different chapters, as many authors may do, there’s an excellent fluidity to the style that I haven’t seen in quite the same way anywhere else. It really shows how we insert ourselves into history and how history is not entirely discreet from the present.
That being said, it’s hard to adapt to the style in the initial pages of the novel. Trying to get a handle on the characters and timeline over the first fifty pages could be a challenge. Even when acclimatized, I did have some difficulties getting engaged by the story. I admit that I started the book in December of last year, and at about a third of the way through I had to pause and read roughly twenty five books before I continued it. When I did resume, though, I found myself much more engaged by the text.
Somewhere around the eighty page mark, Mayta is in bed with one of his communist comrades. Mayta asks him to let him perform sexual acts. You discover that beneath the revolutionary is a young gay man longing for affection in a context that forbids it. Actually, that conflict is an interesting layer to the text—the disconnect between revolutionaries and their lived experiences is pretty compelling. You get to see the way that all the different kinds of communists—the Trotskyites, the Maoists, the Marxists, and all the different factions conflict with one another about revolutionary strategies. It’s compelling to see Mayta’s incentive to unite the groups in a common goal and the subsequent betrayal and expulsion from the party. More than the political strategy, though, Mayta’s homosexuality is thrown back at him as a reason for his expulsion. He is seen as being weak and feminine and therefore unfit to lead the revolution, not to mention that gay people are jailed at the time (ultimately Mayta is imprisoned in the homosexual wing of the prison). It’s a compelling depiction of how the personal has such a huge impact on the political and vice versa.
In fact, the book shows how revolutions and political movements can be so contingent on minor details and contingencies. The bulk of the text focuses on the narrative of Mayta’s failed revolution. When I returned to the book after my lengthy absence, the narrator interviewed Mayta’s wife. There’s an interesting dynamic there because he was a closeted man who got married, had a child, and then became estranged from his family because his wife was not willing to deal with the anxiety of being arrested or killed. From there, we receive an account from old comrades about Mayta trying to unite the communists and staging a revolution at the prison. There’s an intensity to the morning of the revolution when Mayta and his comrades robbed banks to redistribute wealth to the people, imprisoned the guards at the prison, and liberated political prisoners. It has the pacing and intensity of a heist movie, riddled with suspense. The narrator meets with old leaders of the revolution and accessories to it; each tells a fragment of the revolution, noting a step that went wrong, and the narrator speculates on Mayta’s perspective. At one point, when the revolutionaries have been hunted down and are being fired at, Mayta supposedly realizes that they have orders to bring them in alive, and makes choices accordingly—only for two of the revolutionaries to be shot and killed. For a work of, essentially, historical and literary fiction, it’s about as action-packed as it gets.
I appreciate that Llosa reveals early on that the revolution failed, and yet still feels compelled to explore Mayta’s story. It’s a classic underdog story in that sense. It’s somewhat unclear whether Mayta was killed or imprisoned or escaped. Towards the end of the book, though, there’s the notion that Mayta was still in prison many years later. Of course, the narrator feels compelled to visit him and, like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, there are several false starts and disappointments. It’s a beautiful move that is as enticing as it is painful.
The ending has some compelling keys to the rest of the text that complicate the narrative, as well. The narrator repeats a few times that he is doing the research for the book not because he hopes to get a factual account for his novel but so that he will know when he is lying. He admits as much to Mayta, noting, “I try to explain: In a novel there are always more lies than truths, a novel is never a faithful account of events. This investigation, these interviews, I didn’t do it all so I could relate what really happened in Jauja, but so I could lie and know what I’m lying about” (287). He tells Mayta, “Naturally, your real name never appears even once [...] Of course, I’ve changed dates, places, characters, I’ve created complications, added and taken away thousands of things. Besides, I’ve invented an apocalyptic Peru, devastated by war, terrorism, and foreign intervention. Of course, no one will recognize anything, and everyone will think it’s pure fantasy. I’ve pretended as well that we were schoolmates, that we were the same age, and lifelong friends” (288). The entire interplay of truth and fiction becomes exceedingly complex. Is the novel we, Llosa’s audience, are reading the account with altered details? It seems to be. If that’s the case, so few of the details are trustworthy that it calls into question why it’s worth writing about Mayta at all. If the book is accurate, then the ending of the book seems even more peculiar—Mayta explains what really happened and what found him in prison. If that is accurate, then it remains questionable why Mayta is worth writing a book about. He appears more as collateral damage than a mastermind revolutionary.
To return for a moment to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, I’d like to consider the ending. In Nabokov’s work, the ending is absolutely crushing: the narrator finds who he believes to be Sebastian Knight and there’s a heartfelt speech to a dying man—the wrong man, as it turns out. By comparison, Alejandro Mayta ends with the narrator finding Mayta (or does he?—how much of this account is entirely fictitious?) and discussing the events he’s been researching for a year, the failed uprising at Jauja. There’s also a compelling reversal where the narrator explains how he intends to depict Mayta, much to Mayta’s disgust—totally inaccurate to his being. The narrator finds himself disillusioned because the Mayta he has before him cannot remember the details of what happened. There’s some lack of clarity in how much of what Mayta pretends not to remember is still in the recesses of his mind, but nonetheless it is a disheartening experience: something that seems so significant to us is inconsequential to its prime agents:
His memories are hesitant, sometimes erroneous. I have to correct him every few minutes. I’m shocked, because this whole year I’ve been obsessed with the subject, and I naively supposed the major actor in it would be too, and that his memory would still go on scratching away at what happened in those few hours a quarter century ago. Why should it be that way? All that, for Mayta, was one episode in a life in which, before and after, there were many other episodes, as important, or even more so. It’s only normal that these other events would replace or blur Jauja (295).
Mayta offers some engaging commentary about the past, despite claiming not to remember some of the specifics. In the final pages, Llosa reinforces the key idea about the contingencies of history. Mayta comments on the failed revolution, noting that “Those things seem impossible when they fail” but continuing that “If they succeed, they seem perfect and well planned to everyone” (299). He says that the only thing separating his action from the Cuban revolution was luck and that his plan “never seemed crazy to me, much less suicidal [...] It had been well thought out. If we had destroyed the Molinos bridge and slowed down the police, we would have crossed the Cordillera. In the jungle, they never would have found us. We would have …” (299). There’s still a sense of wistfulness, tempered by the sadness of knowing that things could have been so much different — if only the contingencies had been right.
I have to admit that my review of this text is somewhat thin. The style of the text is excellent, the pace of the book is engaging (at least after the first third), the conflict is richly layered and has a human heart to it. While some of the characters are underdeveloped, the central figures of the book, Alejandro Mayta and the narrator, are finely wrought and stand out as effective figures to the literary canon. There’s always somewhat of a disconnect in time and place, which makes the milieu a little less accessible to me, but I still felt that the emotional core of the book and the optimism towards the revolution was enough to make it a worthwhile read. I liked it.
Happy reading!
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