When I met Mario Vargas Llosa in November 1991 at the Wissenschaftskolleg [Institute for Advanced Study] in Berlin and had the chance to put some questions to him about literature and politics, he had already published an account of his unsuccessful bid for the Peruvian presidency in the English journal Granta and was working on an extended version of that essay, planned as a book-length memoir of the political campaign leading up to his defeat in the second round election in June 1990. His Granta essay was appropriately named ‘A Fish out of Water’, tracing the phase of his life from 1987 to 1990 when politics took precedence over literature: from the moment he became the figurehead of the protest movement against President Alan Garcia's plans to bring banks, insurance companies and financial institutions under government control, a move which consequently turned the writer into a full-time politician, up to Vargas Llosa's electoral defeat allowing him to return to his true vocation, literature. In a condensed form, and from a perspective still very close to the events, he presented a testimony of his motivations for entering politics, the intentions and methods he followed in his campaign, the obstacles he encountered and misjudgements he made. The essay ends with the disillusioned résumé of his period as an intellectual in politics, a ‘fish out of water’: ‘No, finally, I don't believe that I succeeded in putting across what I wanted to. Peruvians did not vote for ideas in the elections’ (p. 74).