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Article: Fiction and "real life": Vargas Llosa's 'The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta' and Nabokov's 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.' (Mario Vargas Llosa and Vladimir Nabokov)
- Article from:
- CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- January 1, 1994
- Author:
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Both The Real Life of Alejandro Maym and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight are centrally concerned with the relationship between fiction and reality, although Nabokov and Vargas Llosa themselves ostensibly hold very different attitudes about the nature of this relationship. Debra Castillo notes that the ambiguity of the title of Mario Vargas Llosa's Historia de Mayta "provides a central conceit for the work itself," because the double meaning of the Spanish word "historia" suggests the confusion between history and fiction that is so important to the book as a whole (80). This effect is ostensibly lost in the title of the English translation, The Real Life of Alejandro ...