Temptation of the Word offers an ambitious and careful reading of the creative process--the origin of themes and the development of literary techniques--that Mario Vargas Llosa has brought to each of his novels, published through 1996. To understand the novelist's intellectual environment, Efrain Kristal analyzes the entire corpus of Vargas Llosa's writings, his literary influences in several languages, his intellectual biography, and his political activism, all in the light of the evolving political turbulence of his times and his own changing concept of literature. Temptation of the Word is an ambitious and careful reading of the creative process -- the origin of themes and the development of literary techniques -- that Mario Vargas Llosa has brought to each of his novels that have been published through 1997. To understand the novelist's intellectual environment, Kristal analyzes the entire corpus of Vargas Llosa's writings (including his many books of essays and his plays), his literary influences in several languages, his intellectual biography, and his polemical activism in contentious times, all in the light of the evolution of his political views and his concept of literature.

Kristal's analysis of each of the novels sheds light on how literary techniques, themes, and character types appear, recur, and are transformed over the four decades Vargas Llosa has been active as a writer of narrative fiction. In turn, Kristal's close readings are enriched by other sections of the book that offer insights into the intellectual currents and the political ideas that are addressed in Vargas Llosa's novels. This method brings to bear the most pertinent contextual debates, such as a discussion of the way his works borrow from, and sometimes rewrite, masterpieces by Conrad, Faulkner, Flaubert, Malraux, Stendahl, and Tolstoy, as well as exemplary works in the Latin American narrative tradition.

While the political content of Vargas Llosa's novels has novels betrayed his convictions, he has successfully avoided the temptation-fatal, according to Flaubert -- of reproducing rather than recreating reality. Kristal concludes that the central concern of Vargas Llosa's novels is a premise that the hopes and desires of individuals are always greater than theirability to fulfill them.