Back In Time

By Paul Gray

THE STORYTELLER by Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated by Helen Lane

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

246 pages; $17.95

The unnamed narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa's ninth novel has practically everything in common with his creator: age (early 50s), nationality (Peruvian), occupation (writer). Similarly, the two share a common cosmopolitanism, having spent large swatches of their adult lives in Europe. An autobiographical strain has often appeared in Vargas Llosa's fiction, perhaps most notably and entertainingly in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982). The Storyteller captures the author -- and his surrogate -- in a subdued and ruminative mood.

The reflections are triggered by a chance encounter. On a sabbatical in Italy, reading for a change rather than writing, the narrator wanders through Florence and comes upon a small gallery exhibiting photographs from Peru. One of them arrests his attention. It shows a group of Amazonian Indians arranged in a circle around a standing figure, who seems to have his audience enraptured. The spectator recognizes the name of the tribe captured in the picture: the Machiguengas. He is also convinced he knows the identity of the mysterious speaker. It must be Saul Zuratas, a close friend when both were university students in Lima during the mid-1950s. But how can that possibly be?

Saul is vividly recollected from the old days: Jewish, with springy red hair and a purplish birthmark covering the right half of his face. He is distinguished also by his growing interest in the tribes of Amazonia and their right to survive. The narrator recalls provoking his friend on this subject: "Should 16 million Peruvians renounce the natural resources of three- quarters of their national territory so that 70 or 80 thousand Indians could quietly go on shooting at each other with bows and arrows, shrinking heads and worshipping boa constrictors?" Saul's response is skimpy on particulars but firm in conviction: "Though we don't understand their beliefs and some of their customs offend us, we have no right to kill them off."

After this amicable standoff, and graduation, the friends part company. Later, though, the narrator finds himself thinking more and more about Saul's fascination with so-called primitive people. He wonders, in particular, about evidence that the besieged Machiguengas, dispersed into small groups by enemies and harsh conditions, retain their sense of community through a storyteller who travels wherever listeners can be found, recounting tribal legends, history and gossip. Such a person, the determined writer concludes, amounts to "tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment."

Is this simply a literary conceit, the wishful thinking of someone who has chosen to write in a world that no longer seems to require his labor? With enormous skill and formal grace, Vargas Llosa weaves this question through the mystery surrounding the fate of Saul Zuratas, the former comrade who may have gone backward in time, toward prehistory, to achieve an authority and integrity lost to contemporary writers. Unfortunately, the narrator cannot imagine how Saul could have adapted to such a role: "The rest of the story, however, confronts me only with darkness, and the harder I try to see through it, the more impenetrable it becomes." Given this impasse, The Storyteller seems closer to fact than fiction: a fascinating tale left incomplete through circumscribed realities.