Internationally acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has
contributed a biweekly column to Spain’s major newspaper, El
País, since 1977. In this collection of columns from the
1990s, Vargas Llosa weighs in on the burning questions of
the last decade, including the travails of Latin American
democracy, the role of religion in civic life, and the
future of globalization. But Vargas Llosa’s influence is
hardly limited to politics. In some of the liveliest
critical writing of his career, he makes a pilgrimage to Bob
Marley’s shrine in Jamaica, celebrates the sexual abandon of
Carnaval in Rio, and examines the legacies of Vermeer,
Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others.