Sometimes Vargas Llosa resorts to what has become a signature technique, interleaving conversations that take place at different times, so that we see Trujillo, for example, simultaneously receiving Castillo Armas in his office and complaining about the Guatemalan’s ingratitude to Abbes Garcia. The effect is prismatic; the reader is caught up in the swirl of history, privy to secrets but also unbalanced, buffeted around ... The gravitational pull of Trujillo and his gang of monsters on the narrative is so great that the Guatemalan presidents, the well-meaning Árbenz and preening Castillo Armas, often recede into the distance as the author becomes consumed once again with the grotesque Dominicans ... a book with few heroes and many villains, pulled on by a pervasive undercurrent of despair ... Vargas Llosa has constructed a compelling and propulsive literary thriller, deeply informed by his experience as a public intellectual and a practicing politician. The Latin American novelist and the caudillo will always be mortal enemies, each one attempting to invent or dream into being a future that excludes or suppresses the other. In Harsh Times, Vargas Llosa has pulled back the curtain on a terrifying world of cynical realpolitik, and in a certain sense, has had the last word, demonstrating that no matter how powerful a dictator may be, ultimately his legacy will be shaped by writers.

As he tells the story, Vargas Llosa puts himself, and us, inside the minds of most of these characters, as Shakespeare does with the mind of Macbeth ... I have only sketched this dense though not overlong book, peopled with many other characters whose tangled actions and motivations are reported in detail. After 300-odd pages with this dismal crew, you might crave a shower ... [Vargas Llosa's] characterizations of great and petty monsters in Harsh Times leaves no doubt of his clear eye for the sinister temptations of power, whether of left or right. He is now a citizen of Spain who has taught at Harvard and spends time in London and Peru. Above and beyond his political outlook, Harsh Times proves that he remains at heart a master storyteller.

This is a political novel, also, I suppose, now a historical one ... This richly peopled novel is also a violent political thriller. It is full of action and is, for two reasons, demanding for the reader. First, Vargas Llosa sometimes describes the same incident twice, the second time from a different point of view, when we already know what has happened. This can be confusing. Second, there is a huge number of characters, and I would have found it easier to remember who is who if the publishers had supplied a cast list. Scrupulous readers might be advised to do this for themselves ... Setting such reservations aside, this is a splendidly rich and absorbing novel. It tells remarkable stories and it is, unlike much that may be classed as historical fiction, politically serious. There are sharp portraits, not least of an American ambassador who peddled unreality with missionary zeal. As in the work of some of the author’s masters – notably Conrad and Thomas Mann – the horrors described are relieved, and their reading made tolerable, by a tone of voice rich in irony.

The inner lives of goons and henchmen are difficult to render convincingly: do they feel sad when a crony dies, or do they simply seek out new cronies? Thankfully Vargas Llosa doesn’t demean his subject matter by overegging the psychodrama. Miss Guatemala’s lurid escapades aside, Harsh Times is relatively unembellished: the narrative voice is measured and impassive, allowing events to take centre stage; the dialogue, clipped and controlled, doesn’t strain credibility. The result is a quietly propulsive novel of machinations and recriminations — a well-wrought portrait of the squalid intrigue that constitutes, in the sardonic words of Vargas Llosa’s narrator, 'the eternal story of Central America'.

... both an international political thriller and an epidemiology of anticommunist hysteria. The narrative possesses broad-brush information, yet at the time presents the inner workings of individual characters. Despite the heated ideological conflicts, there aren’t any one-dimensional strawman characters. Everyone has motivations that seem organic, lived-in, and real ... The novel is less an anti-American diatribe (or CIA indictment) than a group portrait of a carefully engineered case of collective insanity.

The sections of Vargas Llosa’s novel that deal with well-known historical figures—Árbenz, Bernays, Castillo Armas—lie rather flat on the page ... The novel lingers longer on the aftermath than on the coup itself. Caca was not in power long—he was assassinated in 1957 by a leftist sympathiser in his presidential guard. The soldier supposedly acted alone, but whether he was part of a larger conspiracy remains unknown. The novel’s version of the assassination follows a not terribly well-sourced theory ... In a book stuffed with limp historical actors and long Wikipedia-like passages, ['Miss Guatemala'] is the only character who achieves lift-off.

... the political is rendered personal through a cast of vivid, grotesque characters and through a narrative structure that is as complex and labyrinthine as the world it describes ... there’s something extraordinarily powerful in Vargas Llosa’s portrayal of individuals caught up in ham-fisted American attempts to influence an earlier world order ... Llosa presents us with a broad cast of characters ... these are almost all historical figures, but rendered in Vargas Llosa’s typically gaudy and Gothic style they seem to step out of history, too alive to be confined to the past tense ... The most striking thing about Harsh Times is how vibrant and contemporary it feels. Vargas Llosa even steps into the pages himself in the last chapter ... It’s a piece of postmodern trickery that allows him to tie up loose ends, to bring the story to a powerful and satisfying conclusion. It’s not just the subject matter that thrills, though; this is a novel that impresses at sentence level, too.

The author leaves little room for ambiguity in his analysis, and Harsh Times often reads more like a disquisition than a novel. More complex is the structure, the narrative sliding backwards and forwards over three Guatemalan presidencies. This is a favourite technique of Vargas Llosa’s, and the effect here is cleverly disorientating, suggesting an inevitability to the cycle of disruption and violence. There are lots of names and very few dates, but the sinuous plot is not difficult to follow because the main themes are so often repeated. Vargas Llosa, who once lost a bid to become the president of Peru, knows how to communicate his ideas, and his intellectualism comes spritzed with humour. He also shares with his Latin American contemporaries, such as Gabriel García Márquez, a love of colour and hyperbole.

The blending of fact and fiction results in a busy, compelling narrative, full of intrigue, backstabbing and shifting power dynamics ... The tone is accusatory, the questions provocative ... [Vargas Llosa's] formidable intellect and years of experience bring a necessary weight to a novel that looks to right real-world wrongs ... Loaded with historical cameos, the timeline can confuse, an issue that’s exacerbated by a stylistic choice to circle back on past events. Elsewhere, this same technique adds poignancy and infuse the political machinations with a sense of loss and regret...In such instances, history comes to life through the skilful rendering of character ... Fans of Vargas Llosa will not be surprised by a metafictional twist at the end, where the author himself tries, and largely fails, to get Marta to own up to the sins of the past.

Vargas Llosa takes a while to get the story going; forward progress often gets bogged down in long sections that read like extracts from a newspaper or a history book ... The publication of a new work by Vargas Llosa is always a major event, but in this go-round, though treading new territory, he relies too heavily on recycled themes, indistinguishable characterizations, and documentary to carry the weight.

This is the kind of novel that mocks the give-it-10-pages, I-need-to-be-grabbed-because-life-is-too-short school of reading. Even those of the trust-the-artist, persevere-and-stand-fast persuasion should prepare to be tested. I confess: I was confused, bewildered, lost. I wrote down the names of the characters. I backtracked. I cross-tracked. I re-tracked. The shape of the narrative only really began to declare itself around page 90. But then … oh, what an engaging education Harsh Times turned out to be, and how I came to look forward to my time in its company ... I should not have doubted a master ... A substantial part of Vargas Llosa’s gift has always been to illuminate the interior lives of characters regardless of their moral position – something only the greatest writers can do. Everyone in this book is mired in consequential life-and-death decisions ... On the second reading, when you know who is who, Harsh Times really comes into its own and, indeed, starts to make artistic sense. The chopping and the changing are designed to make you feel the disorientation, the claustrophobia, the paranoia of the 1950s. Sure, this novel isn’t Vargas Llosa’s finest (although I can’t think of many rival eightysomething authors who could do better). But it is replete with his deep human sensibility; it swarms with life and a determination to tunnel down into the underlying truth of humanity. Power. Politics. Credos and dogma. Senseless, casual death. Hopeless, casual love. The perpetual cruelty that greed recycles. The intergenerational legacy of stupidity. The way humans continually end up running things to their own detriment. Our own detriment.

Peruvian Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa’s latest novel dramatizes political turmoil in 1950s Guatemala while also revealing current anxieties about the untidy boundary between fiction and reality ... Thematically, it’s classic Vargas Llosa in its obsession with power struggles, military hierarchies, and brothels. But it’s also an unsettling reminder of the complicated relationship between storytelling and politics.

... vivid ... Vargas Llosa turns, after two lighter novels, to a pivotal moment in Latin American political history ... History here gets a compelling human face through an artist’s dramatic brilliance.

Peruvian Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa (The Neighborhood) spins a complex and mostly propulsive tale of deception ... [Vargas Llosa] employs a lovely Rashomon-style narration of Armas’s death through multiple perspectives. The fragmented storytelling leads to unnecessary murkiness at some points, but once the action kicks in, everything falls into place. Vargas Llosa writes with confidence and authority, and overall this hits the mark.