I Give You My Silence

Description: "In his final novel, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa returns to his native Peru"-- Provided by publisher.

Brief description: Adrian Nathan West is a novelist, an essayist, and a translator based in Spain. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, McSweeney's, and more. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and a contributing editor at the translation journal Asymptote.

Review Quotes:

"[Vargas Llosa's] last word on Peru, his own inscrutable country, whose mysteries he spent a lifetime trying to untangle . . . A fitting farewell from a gifted novelist whose best work was fueled by his own warring emotions and ideas."
--Michael Greenberg, The New York Times

"[Protagonist] Toño is a wonderful character, a Quixote-like figure who is laughably naive yet strangely compelling . . . The surprise success [of his book] goes immediately to Toño's head, and Vargas Llosa is very funny about the backlash that ensues when a fringe scholar is nudged into the mainstream . . . It makes for a wily and endearing tale . . . in Adrian Nathan West's excellent translation."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, who died earlier this year, tackles Peruvian history and culture in this searching novel, published in Spanish in 2023, about the limits of idealism."
--Publishers Weekly

"Vargas Llosa takes subtle digs at academia, psychiatry, politics, Peruvian society, the literary world, and the fever dreams that inspire messianic projects that inevitably fail . . . A graceful, pensive farewell by a master storyteller."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Vargas Llosa's swan song . . . [I Give You My Silence] deploys a subtle, self-deprecating humour, as though nothing about it were really serious, when much clearly is."
--David Gallagher, Times Literary Supplement