Mario Vargas Llosa's Final Novel is a Love Letter to Peru

The Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's final novel, I Give You My Silence, has been published in Spanish. The book is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa's native country and its music.

The novel's quixotic hero is Toño Azpilcueta, a music journalist who earns a meagre living teaching at a girls' school and writing articles for specialist magazines. He is subsidised by his longsuffering wife, Matilde. Toño is a recognisable type: the impecunious cultural obsessive.

Toño's particular infatuation is the *vals*, a Peruvian musical style that fuses the European waltz with African and indigenous Latin American traditions. One evening, Toño gets an invitation to see an unknown guitarist called Lalo Molfino, who blows him away with his incredible virtuosity.

Before Toño has time to digest the musician's brilliance, he learns of his sudden death. With the help of a small gift of money from a friend, Toño embarks on a project to write a biography of Molfino. "This book would be an homage to his talent, but also much more: he would at last put to paper those ideas about the Peruvian *vals* he had entertained so often."

Toño's Big Idea is that the *vals* is going to save Peru, and possibly humanity. Its blended heritage, he explains, points a way past the trauma that colonialism, racism, dictatorship and terrorism have inflicted on his country.

Toño's quest to write the book involves sleuthing, research, interviews, a journey along Peru's Pacific coast to Molfino's birthplace, and battles with his own demons - in particular, a phobia about rats.

The novel takes the form of two books in one. The odd-numbered chapters are a third-person account of Toño's attempt to research and write the biography. Most of the even-numbered chapters are excerpts from the final work, I Give You My Silence. These end up forming a quirky primer on Peruvian music and culture.

The novel includes essays on the history of the *vals*; the lives of the musicians who created it; the *cajon*, a distinctive Peruvian percussion instrument; Spanish as a regional lingua franca; and *huachafería*, a concept that Toño sees as a key part of Peru's identity. *Huachafería* holds huge significance for both Toño and Vargas Llosa.

The novel's translator, Adrian Nathan West, tells us in a helpful afterword that "dictionaries typically define it as *pretension*". Toño is much more effusive: "*Huachafería* can be brilliant, but it is rarely intelligent: it is intuitive, verbose, solemn, melodic, imaginative and above all maudlin."

This is, in fact, a perfect description of the book that Toño himself is writing, which includes the grandiose and impossible claim that "this book you hold in your hands, reader, will be the starting point of a true revolution that will pull our Peru up from poverty and sorrow, restoring its glory and its creativity, making it a place where all are truly equal and putting an end to the sad divisions of its people".

Toño's mission is clearly bonkers, but he approaches it with a heroic single-mindedness that wins the reader over. And the form the novel takes allows Vargas Llosa to have his cake and eat it too: giving Toño space to explore his ideas in detail, while simultaneously having fun pointing out how overheated they are.

For instance, one of Toño's chapters tells the story of a love affair between Toni Lagarde and Lala Solórzano, a white man from a middle-class neighbourhood and a poor black woman from a rough one. Thanks to a shared interest in music, they meet, fall in love and get married. For Toño the polemicist, it's proof of the redemptive power of the *vals*. But Toni and Lala reappear through the novel as he works on his book, gently pushing back at Toño's efforts to make them emblematic of anything.

Vargas Llosa's own implied verdict on Toño's idiosyncratic attempt to save the world by writing a book about Peruvian music is more nuanced and tender. Vargas Llosa, of course, shared his central character's idealism. At the time the novel takes place, in the early 1990s, Vargas Llosa was also on a failed mission to save Peru, running unsuccessfully to become his country's president.

And just as Toño sees something poignant and important in the maligned quality of *huachafería*, Vargas Llosa finds heroism in his unworldly protagonist. Gentle, impractical dreamers like Toño, he seems to be saying, bring their own kind of changes into the world.

One small proof of this is that by the novel's end, I had followed Toño up the Pacific coast of Peru on Google Maps to the tiny settlement of Puerto Etén, tried to find a recipe for Lala's quince marmalade online, made a *vals* playlist on Spotify and searched the prices of return flights to Lima. If I ever make it there, I'll be sure to pack this fascinating and engaging book.