Letter Men.(two books of letters by famous authors)(Brief Article)

"My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you've read in my letters about the structure of the novel--just sit down and write." The final sentence of the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa's LETTERS TO A YOUNG NOVELIST, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), may undercut the careful tutorial it concludes, but it's probably his soundest advice. As didactic as Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet"--"Have you read 'Jealousy' by Alain Robbe-Grillet?" "And, speaking of Joyce, wasn't 'Ulysses' a cataclysmic innovation?"--Vargas Llosa's book takes the form of a one-sided correspondence with an imaginary fan. Defining the fiction writer as a rebel, a " 'dissident' from reality," Vargas Llosa lectures on persuasiveness and the "aura of indispensability" present in the language of a true writer.