By Mario Vargas Llosa. Edited and translated by John King. The controversial part has to do with Vargas Llosa's politics, which in the 1980's veered to the right. From the outside, it looked as if he had gone from Marx to Mrs. Thatcher in the twinkling of an eye, from a firebrand socialist to the free marketeer who ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 but lost, much to everyone's surprise, to a relatively unknown challenger, Alberto K. Fujimori. This ideological turn did not, of course, endear Vargas Llosa to his former comrades in letters.
Literature Is Fire'' more closely, one begins to understand.
The young Mario Vargas Llosa stated clearly that ''dogma, censorship and arbitrary acts are also mortal enemies of progress and human dignity,'' noting that ''the road to truth is not always smooth and straight.'' Like other Latin American writers in the late 50's and the 60's, he applauded Fidel Castro, but by 1971 he had come to reject the Cuban model. This was made clear in several open letters, one of which is reprinted here. A similar resistance to the brutal aspect of state socialism can be found in ''Socialism and the Tanks,'' written shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In a strange way, this might also be taken as a description of the essayist himself. As he grappled with the complex political realities of South America, he moved inexorably from a naive utopianism to a version of liberalism that involves a commitment to the free market and a passionate attachment to individual liberty.