ABSTRACT
Mario Vargas Llosa is a novelist, playwright, essayist, political commentator, and presidential hopeful whose books include Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), The War of the End of the World (1981), In Praise of the Stepmother (1988), and The Feast of the Goat (2000), as well as Making Waves (1997), His interest in Jewish characters is limited to a single novel: The Storyteller (1987). Loosely based on the life of Isaac Goldemberg (see the corresponding Goldemberg entry), it relates the odyssey of Saúl Zuratas, a Peruvian Jew with a dark birthmark on his face, who, when his studies in anthropology in Lima leave him dissatisfied, decides to disappear into the jungle to become part of an aboriginal tribe on the verge of extinction. The following fragment, from early in the novel, is a portrait of Zuratas. Vargas Llosa has also written essays on the Middle East and on anti-Semitism.
