In the broadest sense of the word, power—sexual, criminal and political—has long been Vargas Llosa's particular subject. Which is only as it should be for a Latin American writer. The continent must be read like a woman's body, regularly violated before the eyes of a complacent public, much of which has spent at least a part of its life subject to arbitrary, and often military, power. The vast majority of the continent's intellectuals (but especially its writers, who form a large portion of the intelligentsia) are thus both unwilling witnesses and perpetual opponents. The results of this mental and physical oppression, and opposition to it, have been curious: a sort of love affair with the myth of power. Or the enshrining of myth, pure and simple (e.g., Borges, Garcia Marquez) —as though the continent were too complex to yield to the traditional means of history, biography and literature.

*

Vargas Llosa's new novel, however, is vastly different from this "political" and often operatic literature. It is an intimate biography of power, cast not in universal but in highly specific terms. Readers of Vargas Llosa's La Guerra del Fin del Mundo, written twenty years ago and still a remarkable re-make of, and reflection on, what is Ibero-America's one uncontested masterpiece, Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes (translated back in the 1930s by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands), will remember how deeply and well, and with what imaginative power, he is able to project himself into history. Indeed, he has always seen power as the key element in human relations of all kinds: his novels have explored it in sex, in a military school, in the police, among criminals, and he has now produced the definitive novel on its ultimate form, dictatorship.

His choice of an example here could not be bettered. All the societies and cultures that lie south of us have turned out marvelous instances of the arbitrary, from Rosas and Francia to Vargas, Peron, Batista and Castro. But for Vargas Llosa the choice of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1891-1961), the Dominican strong man who became a general at thirty-six, took power at thirty-nine, and retained it, with a four-year gap, until his death—though not always openly—is exactly right. This is a man of flesh and blood (and faulty bladder) who may be examined personally, the way literature is meant to, the way Fabrizio del Dongo studies his petty despot and his satraps in The Charterhouse of Parma.

The great skill of Vargas Llosa in this novel has been to make the man comprehensible: not to demonize but to seek to understand. For like many of Latin America's tyrants, especially those who rose to power through the military, Trujillo came up from poverty, had his ideals, sought to improve his country, and became a despot because the balance of forces in that small nation was such that to relinquish power was to abandon the country either to others just like himself, perhaps worse than he, or to opponents who would destroy the country for the sake of alien ideologies. The third way for the Dominican Republic, as Vargas Llosa makes clear, was even more sinister and saturnine: the hypocritical democrat—a man, like Joaquin Balaguer, who cared only for power, not for what he could do with that power.

The degree to which power corrupts has probably never been so explicitly or systematically explored as in this novel. Vargas Llosa's narrative, beautifully modulated, personal (it is narrated in the intimate tu), explores the motives and actions of all his many characters from inside. Here you find not distance or abstraction, but the workings-out of private destinies in public action. It is not just Trujillo who is corrupted, but the nation. The republic is not corrupted by Trujillo; it is an accomplice in its own corruption.

*

Gert Hofmann began his career as a prolific author of radio plays—a productive training ground in the German-speaking world—and it was not until 1980, after nearly ten years teaching German literature at the University of Lyublyana, that he turned to writing novels and short stories. By the time of his death in 1993, having produced a new book almost every year, he was one of rather few German writers with a genuinely international reputation.

His language is deceptively simple, with the innocence and disorder, but also the disquieting perception, of an intelligent child. By means of carefully calculated non-sequitur, varied but persistent repetition of leitmotifs, deft asides to the reader, and the unexpected revelation of telling details, he draws one into a narrative that feels like the unstructured story-telling of a friend. Perhaps because of his long apprenticeship in radio theater, where dialogue is king, an important part of Hofmann's skill lies in allowing his characters to speak for and thus create themselves. This technique is particularly evident in The Film Explainer, where the character in question is a real person, Hofmann's eccentric grandfather, Karl, who ekes out his meagre pension with a job as film explainer in provincial Germany in the 1930s, accompanying the silent on-screen dramas on a beaten-up piano and explaining plot and character to the audience from his soapbox by the screen. Karl Hofmann is a maddening figure, for whom films are more real than the people and earth and buildings around him. They fill his thoughts and conversation, they color his perceptions—they are his world. The novel's German title, Der Kinoerzþhler (literally, "the cinema narrator"), is revealing: by narrating films, Hofmann grandpére is able to invent a narrative for his own life. He has the accoutrements of the artist, like his "artist's hat," therefore he is one—and this makes him someone to reckon with in this provincial backwater. Apart from the poetic fragments and trite aphorisms he scribbles in his notebook, his encyclopaedic knowledge of films is what permits him to consider himself a success and not a failure. All this allows him to push reality to one side, and when the talkies arrive, making his vocation redundant, his life becomes meaningless. When, to make matters worse, his beloved Apollo Cinema itself closes, he no longer even has a theater for his dreams and becomes ripe for recruitment by the Nazis, among whom he can be important again.

*

Delights and duds. Such is the reader's fare. Misled by choruses of praise, he buys a book and it disappoints him. He can't understand why it was so praised. The answers are simple: first, taste, is not widespread, and second, books have long ceased to be taken seriously by most newspapers and magazines: the larger the circulation, the greater the trivialization.

A typical case is Muriel Spark's highly garlanded latest book, Aiding and Abetting (Viking). Had it not been by Muriel Spark, would this thin story of two rival Lord Lucans ("Lucky" Lucan was a cold hedonist sponger who killed his nanny and then disappeared) and a stigmatic psychiatrist ever seen the light of day? Cardboard characters, a routine plot-line, improbable situations, inert language, and a total lack of insight.

*

A good account of a real crime—I've just reread Truman Capote's In Cold Blood to confirm my memory of how good Capote could be when anchored by cold, intractable facts—is Emmanuel Carrere's The Adversary (tr. Linda Coverdale, Metropolitan Books), which is a sort of psychological quest into the reasons behind a crime. Like his earlier Classe de Neige it is sparsely written, perfectly believable, and dispenses with the tedium I have come to associate with those puppet-figures called "detectives" (e.g., Adam Dalgliesh, et al.) with their preternatural ability to see "connections" that would be obvious had the writer been telling the truth from the beginning.

*

In passing, I would like to commend two books. The first, Field Observations (U. of Missouri Press), is a set of stories by Rob Davidson. Davidson is a young writer with a talent for economy of language, the shape of a story, and surprises that spring from character. His people are young, too. They face moral dilemmas of minor dimensions: painting hot cars, recovering lost loves, systematically slashing tires, divorce, the academy and a homosexual advance, barely discerned. Their problems are not earth-shaking, buy they are real to Davidson's characters, well-drawn and authentic.

Much richer stuff is offered by Layle Silbert's The Free Thinkers (Seven Stories Press), which consists of two novellas (The Free Thinkers and The Idealists), which are not, strictly speaking, novellas, but sequences of stories (largely) about Jewish women of immigrant families. In the first, free-thinking (as in free love, unmarried love) is the underlying metaphor—what freedom means and doesn't always provide; the second is about keeping faith, with oneself and with one's ideals.

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That gives a taste of high gifts. The find of the year, however, has to be Manuel Rivas' The Carpenter's Pencil (tr. from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne, Overlook Press). This quite extraordinary, solid, subtle, brief tale, set against the fierce struggles of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) begins with a journalist interviewing Doctor Da Barca, returning from exile in Mexico, who is dying of tuberculosis, and cared for by Marisa—how, when and in what circumstances these two met and fell in love is the central thread of Rivas' tale, which is (however beautiful a tale the love-story is) not all his book is about. In fact it has many themes, so complexly and compactly interwound that close reading, as with most really excellent books, is called for. Daniel Da Barca was in fact condemned to death in 1936 and saved by a "miracle." "I am what you would call an ectoplasm," he informs his interviewer. "Or an alien if you prefer." Because he belongs to "other times." The reader soon becomes engaged in one of the major substrata of the novel, "intelligent reality," which Da Barca explains as follows: "We all let out a thread, like silkworms. We gnaw at and fight over the white mulberry leaves, but that thread, if it crosses over with others and intertwines, can make a beautiful fabric…" The fabric of love. The cloth of friendship.