Mario Vargas Llosa: The Art of Fiction

Mario Vargas Llosa got the 2010 Nobel prize for literature for “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. He is a fantastic writer. I recently  read his "Feast of the Goat". Reading the book I thought that the  brilliant inter temporal and non-linear narrative structure that we see in Alejandro González Iñárritu's movies can be inspired by Llosa. In the interspersed use of time we can see Faulkner' influence who was one of  Llosa's favourite authors

I recently read his quite interesting article that he wrote long back in New York Times in 1984 'The art of fiction'. Some insightful marvelous excerpts that I found are -

 "In fact, novels do lie - they can't help doing so - but that's only one part of the story. The other is that, throgh lying, they express a cruious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled and concealed fasion, masquerading as what it is not. This statement has the ring of gibberish. But actually it's quite simple. Men are not content with their lot and nearly all - rich or poor, brilliant or mediocre, famous or obscure - would like to have a life different from the one they lead. To (cunningly) appease this appetite, fiction was born. It is written and read to provide human beings with lives they're unresigned to not having. The germ of every novel contains an element of non-resignation and desire."

"Real life flows without pause, lacks order, is chaotic, each story merging with all stories and hence never having a beginning or ending. Life in a work of fiction is a simulation in which that dizzying disorder achieves order, organization, cause and effect, beginning and end."

"Fiction betrays life, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, encapsulating it in a weft of words that reduce it in scale and place it within the reader's reach. Thus the reader can judge it, understand it and, above all, live it with an impunity not granted him in real life."

"At the heart of all fictional work there burns a protest. Their authors created them since they were unable to live them, and their readers (and believers) encounter in these phantom creatures the faces and adventures needed to enhance their own lives. That is the truth expressed by the lies in fiction - the lies that we ourselves are, thelies that console us and make up for our longings and frustrations. How trustworthy then is the testimony of a novel on the very society that produced it? Were those men really that way? They were, in the sense that that was how they wanted to be, how they envisioned themselves loving, suffering and rejoicing. Those lies do not document their lives but rather their driving demons - the dreams that intoxicated them and made the lives they led more tolerable. An era is not populated merely by flesh and blood creatures, but also by the phantom creatures into which they are transformed in order to break the barriers that confine them."