The story of Maita

Maite's story represents a new trend in the works of Vargas Llosa, as we see the Peruvian novelist himself as a character participating in writing the novel we read and developing its course. The novelist's character, which gathers testimonies that form the structure of the novel, reveals to us in the end that the true facts are completely different, and much poorer than fictional narration, thus confirming the saying that the novel can be richer and more convincing than history. In a devastated country subjected to an external invasion, sinking into miserable social and economic conditions, and overshadowed by the darkness of the unknown, the novelist—through multiple testimonies—seeks to reconstruct the story of a revolutionary fighter named Alejandro Maite, a hero of a thwarted revolutionary attempt in 1958, and a prisoner several times afterward under ambiguous circumstances. At the end of that long investigation, the confrontation with reality comes to place this fictional story in its precise position. It is a bitter and tragicomedy view of cases of revolutionary extremism and nostalgia for epics.