Mario Vargas Llosa Writing Style

Santiago Zavala goes to a Lima dog pound looking for his dog and finds his father's old driver working there. They leave together and drink at a bar called La Catedral. That table is where Conversation in the Cathedral happens, and the talk at it keeps pulling in exchanges from other years and other rooms, set flush against the sentences at the table, so a question asked over beer gets its answer from an interrogation held years earlier. The join goes unexplained. You sort the voices, and the sorting is the reading.

He was unusually open about his own machinery. Letters to a Young Novelist gives the parts their names: communicating vessels for two episodes braided until each changes what the other means, the hidden fact for the thing a book refuses to say, Chinese boxes for a story that grows a second story inside itself. Those terms are working drawings rather than criticism after the event. You can watch him use every one of them in the novels he had already written.

The Time of the Hero holds back the fact its plot turns on. A cadet called the Slave is shot from behind during field exercises at the Leoncio Prado military academy, and for most of the book the cadets, the officers and the academy's own procedures circle that shot without settling it, which leaves the reader doing the work an investigation would have done. Silence, handled this way, is load-bearing.

What carries over to a smaller book is the discipline under the noise. Every splice is a claim that two moments belong together, and he pays for the claim by making each strand stand up alone, the way Faulkner alternates a doomed love affair and a convict's flood story in The Wild Palms and trusts you to feel the rhyme. Structure, for him, is an argument about cause. Learn the argument and you can leave the fireworks alone.

Telescoped dialogue

Two exchanges from different times cut into each other line by line, inside one paragraph, with no announcement of the switch. The reader assigns each line by voice, which is why he loads his speakers early with tics, ranks and private nicknames. It answers a problem long books about power keep running into, because the cause and the consequence can sit decades apart and a flashback would let the reader file them in tidy order. Spliced, they land as one event. The failure mode is porridge, so the sane way in is four lines of it rather than four pages.

Invented time

Novel time, for him, is made rather than measured, and it obeys attention instead of the clock. His examples are stories where a whole life fits inside a second, among them Borges's The Secret Miracle, which grants a condemned man a year of mental composition between the order to fire and the bullets. His own books run the trick at length. One afternoon of drinking in a bar holds a decade of dictatorship, and your sense of how long the book lasted has more to do with pressure than with the calendar inside it. Ask what a scene feels like from inside, then build the clock to match.

The document chapter

Stretches of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service arrive as army paperwork: requisitions, situation reports, the transcript of a radio host talking himself into a fury. An institution describing its own conduct in its own words condemns itself more thoroughly than a narrator could, because the contempt comes from the reader and the prose stays polite. Paperwork also carries dates, names and figures that would sink a dramatised scene. Done badly it is a costume. The form has to be one the institution would really produce, and what leaks out of it has to be something the writer of the document could not see himself leaking.

The unattributed line

A line of dialogue with no tag is a small change of narrator. For one sentence the character has taken the telling over, and writing "said Gamboa" would hand it straight back to the invisible third person. He noticed this in his criticism and used it at scale, dropping attributions until you stand inside the exchange. Speed comes free with it. Clarity does not, so the paragraph around the dialogue has to have fixed the room, the rank and the grudge before the tags come off.

Cruxes against dead time

He kept two words for chapters: the ones where events concentrate, and the connective ones that carry you between them. Most writing advice says to cut the second kind. He argued the opposite, that a poem can be pure distillate and a novel cannot, because the errands and the waiting rooms are what convince a reader that the world keeps running while the plot is elsewhere. The test is not whether a quiet chapter is quiet. The test is whether something is being wound tighter while it stays quiet.

Names as positions

His characters carry nicknames from the group and surnames from the institution, and the gap between them holds much of his characterisation. The Jaguar, the Slave, the Poet and the Boa run the barracks in The Time of the Hero, and their surnames, when the book reaches for them, turn them back into ordinary Peruvian boys with mothers and addresses. Which name a scene uses tells you who is in charge of it. Once an officer starts saying a cadet's real surname, the academy has taken the room back.

Communicating vessels

Two episodes from different times or places, braided so that each one modifies the other. His model is the agricultural show in Madame Bovary, where the prize-giving for livestock below and Rodolphe's declarations above keep interrupting one another until both sound absurd. He was strict about the test. Proximity on the page counts for nothing on its own, and unless some current passes between the two episodes you have a collage. In his own books that current tends to be causal, so the bargain struck in one strand pays for the cruelty in the next.

The hidden fact

A fact the story needs and refuses to state. He split the technique in two. The elliptic fact goes out of the book for good and the reader rebuilds it from the dent it leaves, the way Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy gives you a husband who exists only in how obsessively the furniture is watched. The anastrophic fact is displaced rather than deleted, coming back late, which is the mystery novel's engine and also the shape of The Feast of the Goat. Hemingway's warning travels with the device. Omit a thing you understand and the reader feels its weight, omit a thing you skipped past and the page turns hollow.

Chinese boxes

A story that contains a second story, told so that the inner one alters the outer one. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter alternates chapters of a young writer's affair with chapters of the radio serials Pedro Camacho is churning out for a Lima station, and as Camacho comes apart his serials start invading each other, characters dying in one and turning up in another under someone else's name. Frame and inset then tell the same story about exhaustion. That reverberation is the whole point of the technique for him. A nested tale you could lift out with nothing lost is decoration, and he called that case collage.

Shifts in the level of reality

His third axis of point of view is the plane the narrator stands on relative to the story: real or fantastic, outward or interior. The Storyteller sets chapters of a Peruvian writer in Florence, studying photographs from the Amazon, against chapters spoken by a Machiguenga storyteller whose account of the world runs on myth, and which plane holds the truth about the man who crossed over stays open to the end. The shift itself is the effect he wants. A reader who feels the floor change level starts paying attention to the telling instead of only to the events, and where García Márquez tips a whole village onto the mythic plane and keeps it there, Vargas Llosa mostly holds the realist ground and gets his strangeness from arrangement.

Cutting scenes together and calling it structure

The shuffle is the easy half. Two episodes placed next to each other do nothing for one another by default, and his own rule demanded a current between them, however faint. Without it the reader meets each cut as an interruption at the exact point where something had started to build, learns that the switches carry no information, and begins skipping ahead to whichever strand they care about. Ask the ugly question before you keep the arrangement. If these two chapters ran in plain sequence, would either one mean anything different? A no means the montage is decoration, and decoration at this price is worse than a straight line.

Omitting what you have not worked out

Imitators hear that the master leaves things out and take it as permission to be vague. Hemingway, who gave him the idea, was blunt about the condition attached: a writer may leave out what he knows, and a writer who leaves out what he has not understood makes hollow places in the writing. The difference shows on the page. A loaded silence bends everything near it, so characters avoid a subject and scenes behave oddly around the gap. You feel its shape without being told. A vague silence bends nothing. Work out what happened in full, in a note that stays in your drawer, and only then decide which parts of it the book withholds.

Copying the splice without building the voices

The telescoped dialogue is the most imitated thing he does and the least forgiving. It looks like a texture effect. It is a bookkeeping system, and it depends on the reader tagging every line to a speaker within a word or two, which he buys in advance by giving each man a distinct verbal habit and a fixed way of addressing the others. Take that away and the page reads as one voice arguing with itself. Readers rarely report confusion in a case like this. They report boredom, close the book, and blame the plot.

Writing the politics as opinion

The temptation with material like his is to state the case, since the cases are worth stating. His novels take their weight from procedure instead: who signs the order, who has to wait in the corridor, who can reach the president by telephone and who has to ask a favour of a man who can. A speech asks the reader to agree with it. A procedure shows the reader how the harm gets done and leaves them to arrive at the verdict alone, which is the slower road and the one that holds. Once narration starts explaining a regime, the characters stop manoeuvring inside it, and the scene gives up the only pressure it had.