The Storyteller

A visitor from Peru, happening upon an exhibition of photographs from the Amazon jungle in an obscure Florentine picture gallery, finds his attention drawn to a picture of a tribal storyteller seated among a circle of Michiguenga Indians. There is something odd about the storyteller. He is too light-skinned to be an Indian. As the visitor stares at the photograph, it dawns on him that he knows this man. The storyteller is his long-lost friend, Saul Zuratas, his classmate from university who was thought to have disappeared in Israel. The Storyteller is a brilliant and compelling study of the world of the primitive and its place in our own modern lives.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He is the author of some of the last half-century's most important novels, including The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Conversation in the Cathedral. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.