Said about Llosa

As a writer, however, politics has returned as an important, even obsessive focus in his fiction. In his own literary theory, Vargas Llosa has frequently adverted to the "demons" which drive an author to write, and as Sabine Kollman (2002: 1) has noted, in the case of Mario Vargas Llosa "politics is one of the most persistent 'demons' which ... provoke his creativity". In the wake of his resilement from the Left, then, he produced a number of novels exploring and exposing the destructive idealism of revolutionary socialism, which might begin with a millennarian vision of a perfect society but which invariably ends with dictatorial oppression, enforced conformism, the denial of human rights, and social and economic devastation. It was this series of novels, The War of the End of the Worm (1981), The Real Life of Alejandro Mavta (1984), Death in the Andes (1993a), and more recently The Wav to Paradise (2003a), which incurred the wrath of left-wing critics and fellow writers, and led to Vargas Llosa being reviled as a reactionary conservative.

And yet, for anyone who has read Vargas Llosa's work over the past several decades, his political position is quite clear. He is a writer who is opposed to the anti-individual tyranny of both right-wing nationalism and left-wing collectivism, and who believes resolutely in the core values and rights of liberal democracy. Far from being a conservative or what Michael Valdez Moses has floridly if misleadingly termed "the eminence grise of Latin American neoliberalism" (2002: 1), (5) he is, by his own definition, a classical liberal who upholds "the basic precepts of liberalism--political democracy, the market economy, and the defense of individual interests over those of the state" (2005: 3). It is this fundamental belief in the principle of individual liberty and autonomy which distinguishes Vargas Llosa's thought from that of both the Right and the Left, and which gives his work its distinctive quality. Having explored the damage wrought by utopian socialism in a number of his novels, then, he turns his attention to the similarly damaging effect of authoritarian extremism in The Feast of the Goat.