When I last visited Llosa--has it really been over a decade?--I was tickled by the way I allowed myself to be confused by the identities and names of the different characters. Was I an obtuse reader, who missed obvious markers early in the book and labored under an unintended misconception? Was it a trick of language and/or translation? Or was Llosa really clever enough not only to trick me, but to leave me wondering if I had actually tricked myself?
It is edifying to be able to report that not only is Llosa that clever (and correspondingly that I am not hopelessly obtuse), but that this cleverness has a theme, one that I merely suspected was intentional in La Ciudad y Los Perros, but occupies the very heart of El Hablador. It is, in fact, taken even further. "Who is a person in relation to their name?" is broadened until the reader asks along with the various Habladores of the book, the writer, the narrator, and the eponymous speaker, "What is reality in relation to what is said about it?"
Llosa's answer, to the extent that he can be said to offer such a thing, is from a certain perspective, "Reality is what we say it is." The stories that we tell about ourselves, our family, our culture, or reality itself, become real by virtue of the speaking. Coy as ever, though, Llosa also allows himself a certain amount of wiggle room by offering multiple viewpoints and variations on the stories he tells here. The central figure in the matroyshka of speakers, Saul, even peppers his stories with "Eso es, lo menos, lo que yo he sabido," a hedge that acknowledges the implicit fuzziness of the reality we create by speaking. Which version is correct? Which speaker is telling the truth? And, as an important substrate, which view of important cultural and political issues is right and just? It is no surprise that Llosa's answer is a non-answer, an irresolution, a return of the reader's gaze inward to ask "What has been said, Escuchador, what did it create for you?"
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