Product details
- ISBN 9780571352180
- Weight: 398g
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 12 Jan 2023
- Publisher: Faber & Faber
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel Laureate maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and departure from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.
Writers like Adam Smith, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin helped the author navigate through these uneasy years of intellectual formation. They showed him another school of thought that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class or party, and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal and philosophical ideology.
Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's greatest living novelists, but, as Clive James wrote in Cultural Amnesia, his 'true strength' is 'undoubtedly in the essay'.
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He also won the Cervantes Prize, the most distinguished literary honour in the Spanish-speaking world. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter as well as several collections of essays, journalism and plays. He died in April 2025.
John King (translator) is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, and he has edited and translated several volumes of Vargas Llosa's essays, including Making Waves and Touchstones. He is professor of Latin American cultural history at the University of Warwick, England.
