Fifty-two years have passed since Vargas Llosa and García Márquez, two still young Latin American novelists, had this very strange conversation in Lima that the reader is about to read. It is very strange because there is not a single significant word in it that has not undergone a dramatic transformation after all this time. The title of the conversation, The Novel in Latin America, seems harmless, simple, descriptively indicative, but we immediately understand that neither the novel nor Latin America nor, much more so, the Latin American novel are what Vargas Llosa and García Márquez spoke about in September 1967. And this is because, please pay attention, what actually happened is Vargas Llosa and García Márquez: Because this half-century is the era of the success and influence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the monstrous ambition of Conversation in the Cathedral, the admired works of our tradition which are Chronicle of a Death Foretold and La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World]; because this half-century is also a time of transformations in our political world (from the Padiya case* and

Pinochet to Fujimorism* and the long rule of Fidel Castro) and these two novelists were present throughout. Borges, who is often mentioned in this conversation, forever defined the idea in Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote: the passage of time – and this strange embodiment of time that books we write are – changes words. This is one of the most constructive ways to read this conversation. For us, Latin American readers and writers, the words used in 1967 to explain the historical moment no longer exist: They were destroyed and reinvented over the years and today we do not use them as they used to. Since loneliness is mentioned as a theme of their books, García Márquez is afraid that this will be considered overly "metaphysical" and, therefore, "reactionary"**; when Vargas Llosa speaks of the "responsibility" of