Author Bio

A native of Peru and the author of The Andes Viewed from the City (1987), Efrain Kristal is currently professor of Spanish & comparative literature at UCLA

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Main Description

Choice Outstanding Academic Book 1998

Temptation of the Word offers an ambitious and careful reading of the creative process--the origin of themes and the development of literary techniques--that Mario Vargas Llosa has brought to each of his novels, published through 1996. To understand the novelist's intellectual environment, Efrain Kristal analyzes the entire corpus of Vargas Llosa's writings, his literary influences in several languages, his intellectual biography, and his political activism, all in the light of the evolving political turbulence of his times and his own changing concept of literature.

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Reviews

Forthright comparative criticism without the tics of jargon or pretentious literary philosophy, this is an excellent and eminently readable vade mecum for a world-class author. For anglophone readers, it is unquestionably the place to start in the pleasurable unraveling of the mysteries of Vargas Llosa's fiction.
--Choice Outstanding Academic Book 1998

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Temptation of the Word manages to do what much extant criticism of this author has attempted and failed at: to give a virtually totalizing view of Vargas Llosa's work without reducing it to one single theme, or siding with one political position. This constitutes a new and original treatment of the subject and represents comparative literature at its traditional best.
--Enrico Mario Santi, Georgetown University

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