Letters to a Young Novelist (book review) Mario Vargas Llosa

Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

201010: exactly what i would have wanted to read at fifteen, as an aspiring novelist. concise, capacious, complex. on everything from don quixote to junky, this series of letters addresses first the abstract what it is to write, as vocation, then the theoretical how it is written, in narrative, space, time, planes of reality, in shifts, qualitative leaps and nested stories, what is not said, what is said by implication... finally exhorting the reader to read but not imitate only favorites. and all in less than forty thousand words...