Mario Vargas Llosa is considered one of the great Latin American writers of our time. Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa is a very readable companion guide to Llosa’s works that traces the development of the novelist’s craft and thought while probing and analyzing the entire body of writings to date of this celebrated author of The War of the End of the World. His popularity as a writer has been augmented recently as he has attracted international attention for his political involvement in Peru and his presidential campaign in the 1990 national elections. The book includes sections on the helix narrative, stories within stories, double and multiple time and space, cinema and narrative technique, fragmentation and coherence, fiction and history, the hero and society, the failed hero and the writing of fiction, autobiography and fiction, and the writer as hero.