Fruit for Thought

Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2019 novel first published in Spanish and now translated into English, is a didactic book. Set before and after the U.S.-orchestrated coup that toppled Guatemala’s socialist president, Jacobo Árbenz, in 1954, its message is spelled out repeatedly across some 300 pages and then again—as though the reader were in danger of missing the point—in its final paragraph: “When all is said and done, the North American invasion of Guatemala held up the continent’s democratization for decades at the cost of thousands of lives, as it helped popularize the myth of armed struggle and socialism throughout Latin America.”

For all the endless debates over the proper role of politics in literature, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a stark example of what might be called liberal is no paean to the free market: The novel is largely an acid denunciation of the extent to which the role of corporate interests in the establishment of the U.S. superpower has come at a steep social and political cost.