The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Apparently there’s a genre familiar to Latino writers south of the US. As far as I know, it doesn’t have a name, but its basic form is this: An interested historian absent from the events of the novel seeks to piece them together after the fact. Junot Diaz uses it in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Mario Vargas Llosa uses it in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. Call it the hearsay novel.

Having just coined the genre, which makes me the authority by default, I feel comfortable telling you that hearsay novels address issues of historical uncertainty and unknowability. Novels usually make the claim that you can know somebody, and do so by plopping you in their head, but Mayta concedes to reality (mimicking the disillusionment in the narrative, as we’re shown the chimera of liberal politics), and presents you with a list of possibilities. Pick which one you like best.

Hearsay or not, there’s no question Llosa is playing around with the idea of the novel. This is a story not just best told, but only told as a novel. It’s the same idea I wrestled with after seeing Watchmen; my feeling is that stories shouldn’t just happen to told in whatever medium they might fall, but because they must be a movie/comic book/novel. Form shapes content, and content shapes form. Llosa seems to get this. He identifies the pillar of the novel — tense, character, plot — and systematically subverts them.

Start with tense. Simple conjugation, the difference between “walk” and “walked,” can establish what would take a movie team weeks to. You want something to happen in the past? Costume department will have to fabricate a whole new wardrobe, and the production assistants will have to pay some classic car collector five grand to rent his Shelby Cobra and park it on the street. It’s much easier for the author – “It was 1970, and I was walking down the street. I caught my reflection in the cobalt flank of a Shelby Cobra.” Of course, as CGI departments approach absolute fidelity at lower cost, this authorial advantage diminishes. But one will remain: the ability to disorient the reader. Llosa will switch timeframes on the same page, in the same paragraph — even in the same sentence. A movie flashing back like this would necessarily have to announce its movements; characters would be younger, clothes different, etc. But Mayta mocks linear time by fostering this bewildering fluidity between past and present. Here’s a for instance:

“Hello, godmother,” Mayta said. “Happy birthday.”

“Mrs. Josefa Arrisueno?”

“Yes. Come in, come in.”

She’s well preserved.

It is jarring, but not half as irritating as you might think. What does become distracting is when Llosa further complicates your ability to ground yourself, by having the first person narrator begin to imagine himself as Mayta, so that “I” might refer to either our narrator or our protagonist. It’s a risky choice, but as a reader you figure it out quickly enough, so that whenever you begin to feel discombobulated, assume that Llosa has jumped you through time. In my English classes, “logic” is the buzzword of the hour, so I’m not thrilled to use it, but Llosa really does develop a logic and internal consistency to these time shifts, so you can learn to anticipate them.

Characters, like the moment, become negotiable. The narrator traipses all over Peru in an effort to assemble an accurate portrait of Alejandro Mayta, the titular revolutionary. His different comrades and acquaintances provide their different recollections, so Llosa gives us the unfiltered mass of it and trusts us to develop a sense of Mayta alongside the narrator. What we get, then, is a multiplicity of Maytas. This undermines a principal of the novel, a form very concerned with the development of characters. Writing teachers will always ask you: what’s changed for your character by the end of the story? Where has their arc taken them. For Mayta, the arc is not a single curve that we can follow with our finger. There are discontinuities, fractures. The Mayta we think we know might never have existed at all, a problem the narrator acknowledges:

It’s as if the person next to me were different from the person who was just in my study, and different from the Mayta in my story. A third, wounded, lacerated Mayta, whose memory is intact.

Just like the tense, and just like the characters, the plot is slippery. For a novel that purports (with its title) to tell the true story of Alejandro Mayta, the text itself throws up its hands very quickly. What we get is the narrator’s sense of the thing, which may be completely off-base. It highlights a central absurdity to novel reading. Everything in a novel is a lie, but we still hate being lied to. It’s one more challenge Llosa throws up. But his sense of touch gives you the sense that you’re in good hands, and these obstacles, instead of frustrating you, invigorate you, like a physical task just challenging enough. If you’re willing to put in the work, Llosa will reward you.