Recent years have brought forth powerful and violent fictions from Latin America, including Juan Villalobos’s and Laura Restrepo’s nightmarish meditations on the drugs trade, Evelio Rosero on state terror in Colombia and the dislocated cult novels of Roberto Bolaño. Given such nerve-jangling reading, it’s reassuring to be back with Mario Vargas Llosa in a landscape so familiar it even contains some of his old characters, as well as themes that have run through his work since the 1960s.

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