he Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta (1986), Mario Vargas
Llosa's fictional portrait of
a Peruvian revolutionary,
captures in its opening
pages the desperate poverty that has become commonplace throughout the South American nation. The narrator of the novel, a writer himself, is out for an early morning jog through his neighbor- hood when he comes across "stray kids, stray men, and stray women along with the stray dogs, all painstakingly digging through the trash looking for something to...