Toño is a wonderful character, a Quixote-like figure who is laughably naive yet strangely compelling ... It makes for a wily and endearing tale, and in Adrian Nathan West’s excellent translation, the writing is remarkably untroubled by the stylistic sclerosis that can afflict writers with Vargas Llosa’s prestige ... Charming.
Precise, largehearted prose ... Vargas Llosa has written with brutality, humor, sarcasm and hardened empathy about Peru and Latin America. With I Give You My Silence he adds a moving tenderness. Both erudite and raw, the novel was completed in 2022, when the author knew he had a terminal illness. Like most of his late fiction it is written plainly, yet it is shot through with passages that recall his most passionate work ... A fitting farewell from a gifted novelist whose best work was fueled by his own warring emotions and ideas.
A sweet, light story about art and idealism—and its ever-present opposite, cynicism—that is gently comic ... The novel never finds its way or sustains its early energy ... Although the novel’s central tension seems not quite resolved or released, it is clear that both Toño and Lalo share one premise: that art by itself can supply the key to a rich and full life.
If this novel proves to be Vargas Llosa’s swan song, then it is hard to imagine a better one. It deploys a subtle, self-deprecating humour, as though nothing about it were really serious ... Charming.
Vargas Llosa leaves us with a work that feels light and humorous, entertainingly narrated by a rambling intellectual with opinions about everything, especially Lima’s rat population. But as usual Vargas Llosa dances with powerful themes, and it’s tempting to read this work not as a victory lap but as a somber assessment of his own shortcomings.
