Mario Vargas Llosa : From Lima With Style: A Novel Approach to the Presidency

In any ranking of Latin America’s finest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is a dominating presence. After today’s presidential election in Peru, however, he may be trading a most private art form for public office.

Like many Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa has lived close to the political fray for much of his 54 years. He was part of a communist cell in college. Yet he is running for Peru’s presidency, not on the usual leftist artists’ platform but on a rarefied version of free-market liberalism--and invoking the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe to press his case.

His message and non-politician style have so captivated Peruvians that he may well win in the first round today, outpolling all three other candidates combined.

Vargas Llosa spent years outside Peru, savoring the life of the expatriate writer in a Paris garret--and later in a London flat that he still owns. Peru’s hard-skinned pols sniffed at the notion that he could survive, let alone prevail, in their rough world. Yet his tempering by years of warring with fellow intellectuals has apparently served him well.

He quit the campaign last year in a squabble with his right-wing coalition partners. The skeptics gloated; his artistic sensibilities had been bared. Quickly, though, he won the concessions he sought and returned to the race. It was then that his poll ratings surged.

Some Peruvians still wonder if his ideological purity will prove his undoing when he comes to govern this poor, violent, fractious nation.

But he has trudged most of Peru to know the country he portrays so grittily in such books as “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “Conversations in the Cathedral” and “The Green House.” If some critics complain that his recent work lacks the power of his novels of the ‘60s and ‘70s, few deny his grasp of Peru’s rhythms and moods.