TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 6/11/97: Bright Angel Time By Martha McPhee Fiction 6/10/97: Dreaming of Hitler By Daphne Merkin Nonfiction 6/09/97: Kowloon Tong The Collected Stories By Paul Theroux Fiction 6/6/97: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly By Jean-Dominique Bauby Nonfiction 6/05/97: The Story of the Night By Colm Tòibín Fiction 6/04/97: Some of Me By Isabella Rossellini Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: No more magic realism By Alberto Fuguet A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

making waves BY MARIO VARGAS LLOSA FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX 336 PAGES NONFICTION BY EDWARD NEUERT "Making Waves" is a packed suitcase of a book from a writer who has packed many a suitcase. In more than three decades of peripatetic living, Mario Vargas Llosa has bounced from his native Peru to Madrid, Paris, Princeton and Washington, then back to Peru and the frying pan of politics (where he unsuccessfully challenged Alberto Fujimori for the Peruvian presidency in 1990) and on to London, where he lives today. Through all these journeys, he's turned out more than a dozen works of fiction, mostly novels, and is today, along with Gabriel García Márquez, probably the Latin American writer best known in the United States. But all along he has been a journalist too, filing pieces regularly for newspapers and magazines in Peru and Spain (where he holds dual citizenship). It is a selection of this material -- 46 essays in all -- that has been brought together in this book and translated for the first time by John King. It's hard to think of a figure in the contemporary American literary scene who could turn out such a wide-ranging book -- John Updike may be the only contender. "Making Waves" puts you in mind of those literary and social miscellanies Edmund Wilson used to weld together and launch into the harbor every decade or so from the '40s to the '60s. Vargas Llosa tackles a slew of subjects from the last 35 years: literary figures like Hemingway, Camus, Joyce, Lessing, Dos Passos, Sartre, Rushdie, Bellow, Mamet and -- a deep favorite of his -- Faulkner; the sociopolitical climates of Cuba, Nicaragua and Peru; the films of Buñuel; the atmosphere of a Parisian dog cemetery; World Cup soccer; the pitfalls of the British educational system and, so help me, the dismembered member of John Wayne Bobbitt ("a name," Vargas Llosa writes, "that seems a programme for life"). All the essays in this collection are short, but the feeling of great depth they produce when read together is profound. Everything seems connected: the poor, violent miners of the Peruvian jungle are later translations of the Snopes of Yoknapatawpha County, the intrusions of the Soviets into Eastern Europe and the Americans into Central America have their vital similarities, and the blustering of Hemingway and the shortcomings, as it were, of the unfortunate Mr. Bobbitt give parallel insight into the destructive power of machismo. "Every Peruvian writer is defeated in the long run," writes Vargas Llosa in a piece about one of his countrymen. Writing is a career "against which a society like [Peru's] is perfectly inoculated, a vocation that Peru attacks and eradicates in embryo." So Peru gets the puffery of Fujimori and the rest of us get the clear style and quiet intelligence of Vargas Llosa. From this side of the fence, I'd say we got the better part of the deal. June 12, 1997 Edward Neuert lives in Richmond, Vt. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html