On the evening of August 21, 1987, standing before a frenzied crowd of over 100,000 Peruvians jammed shoulder to shoulder in San Martin Plaza in Lima, the renowned writer Mario Vargas Llosa delivered an incendiary speech denouncing President Alan Garcia’s proposed nationalization of Peru’s banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions. To fervent applause, Vargas Llosa declared that economic freedom and political freedom were inseparable and that private property and the market economy offered the only path to peace, progress, and prosperity for Peru. Rumor has it that President Garcia, a populist socialist with despotic inclinations, watching on television as his political ambitions were frustrated by this mass demonstration, demolished his set in a fit of rage.

In retrospect Garcia’s explosion of temper seems justified, for the rally in San Martin Plaza launched Vargas Llosa’s meteoric political career as leader of Movimiento Libertad (the Freedom Movement) and front-running candidate for the Peruvian presidency. Nearly three years later, in April 1990, Vargas Llosa won a narrow plurality in the initial round of the presidential election. But his political odyssey was not fated to end in triumph. In June he lost the runoff election to an obscure Japanese-Peruvian agronomist, Professor Alberto Fujimori. In the aftermath of his unsuccessful campaign (and Fujimori’s subsequent coup d’etat in 1992), Vargas Llosa has returned to the vocation that had already made him, on that critical night in 1987, one of the most famous cultural figures in Latin America. Although his vision of a truly democratic Peru remains unrealized, and his native country has fallen victim yet again to authoritarian rule, the recent publication of Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, Death in the Andes (translated by Edith Grossman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 279 pages, $ 24), testifies to the undiminished artistic powers of one of the most accomplished writers in the world.