La utopía arcaica : José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo

An anthropologist, academic, and militant intellectual, Arguedas “was a good man and a good writer, but he could have been even better if, given his extreme sensitivity, generosity, naiveté, and ideological confusion, he hadn't succumbed to the political pressure of the academic and intellectual circles in which he moved, pressure that led him to abandon his natural inclination toward reverie, private memory, and lyricism, and instead write social, indigenist, and revolutionary literature,” as Vargas Llosa himself states. A blend of biography, history, and literary criticism, *The Archaic Utopia* paints a vivid picture of the country's historical context, reviews Arguedas's life, analyzes his books, and attempts to describe the self-sacrifice of a literary talent for ethical and political reasons.