La verdad de las mentiras / The Truth About Lies
Non-fiction , 2002
Alfaguara
Pages: 448
"That space between our real life and the desires and fantasies that demand it be richer and more diverse is where fiction resides."
Life is one, and it has limits. Reading novels shatters those limits, and what was once a single life becomes a thousand, infinite lives. That is literature’s greatest power, and this book allows us to partake in it.
Lolita, Death in Venice, Heart of Darkness, Manhattan Transfer, Tropic of Cancer, and The Tin Drum are just some of the 20th-century masterpieces Mario Vargas Llosa explores in these pages. Through his words, he reveals the profound connection between reading and the endless ways in which it can expand our experience of life.
These essays are accompanied by a prologue—full of lucid and passionate reflections on the meaning of fiction—and an epilogue. This splendid conclusion is both an invitation to the pleasures of reading and a deep dive into the opinions of one of the most brilliant writers of our time on the role of literature and the present and future of the book.
"Mario Vargas Llosa's writing has shaped our image of South America and earned its own chapter in the history of contemporary literature. In his early years, he was a renovator of the novel—today, he is an epic poet." Per Wästberg, President of the Nobel Committee
"His books contain the most complex, passionate, and compelling vision of the novel and the novelist’s craft I have ever encountered; they are also the best inspiration a writer could hope for." Javier Cercas, El País