Novel Candidate : Books: Mario Vargas Llosa lost the race for the presidency of Peru, but gained more readers for his latest novel. He was pleased with both outcomes.

BOSTON —  To let the Peruvian public know just what kind of a depraved soul was Mario Vargas Llosa, then a candidate for the country’s presidency, the government-owned television station in Lima had his latest book read out loud at peak hours, when voters would be watching.

The book was “In Praise of the Stepmother” (published in the United States in October by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), an unself-consciously erotic novel.

“Mothers, take your children away from the television,” the narrator warned. “You are about to hear the most obscene words in the Spanish language.

“This man who would pretend to be the president of Peru,” the voice continued, “will bring pornography to the house of Pizarro!”

It was certainly an earnest gesture. “But I don’t think it had much effect,” Vargas Llosa said.

He lost last June’s election to Alberto Fujimori, a Japanese-Peruvian agronomist. “But the book was in general well-received in Peru.”

Vargas Llosa ranks the two events in just that order: lost the presidency, won the readership--which to him is probably a good deal more important.

“I never wanted to be a professional politician,” he said on a visit here. “My vocation had been literature.”

Before his bid for the presidency, Vargas Llosa, 54, had spent much of his adult life outside Peru. He now lives in London in an apartment his family owns. But his love for his country and his concern for its future never waned. Of his 12 books, only one, “The War of the End of the World,” does not take place in Peru.

His desire to aid in the modernization of Peru, to “eradicate the causes of injustice and to create a modern society” helped persuade him to run for the presidency.

Campaigning as the candidate of a center-right coalition, Fredemo , Vargas Llosa entered the three-year quest for the presidency with “great expectations.” But after the first round of elections, “I knew it was practically an impossible task. I knew that all the left, the party of the government, would make an alliance against me.

“Or worse,” he said, “that if by any chance I had won, it would have been very difficult to govern.”

Though he considered it “my obligation” to accept his party’s nomination, “it was from a personal point of view a sacrifice” to run for president, Vargas Llosa said.

“Literature and politics are incompatible,” he said. “You can’t really be a president and keep your literature alive.”

Vargas Llosa suffered during the campaign.

“It was terrible,” he said. “I had no time for reading. It was worse than no time for writing.”

Reading was Vargas Llosa’s passion “since I was very, very young,” he said. “I think the most important thing that has happened to me is to learn how to read.”

He wrote poems as a child, then switched to journalism in his teens. He published a collection of short stories in 1958 at age 22, and his first novel four years later. Vargas Llosa taught writing in England and Spain until 1974, when “I became exclusively a writer.” The worldwide critical acclaim for his novels has led to Vargas Llosa being mentioned annually as a Nobel Prize candidate.

Eroticism has been featured in his earlier works, for example, “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” an erotic satire about Vargas Llosa’s own marriage at 18 to a 32-year-old aunt by marriage. But in “In Praise of the Stepmother,” eroticism becomes a theme, not merely an element.

“Let me tell you, this is a book that is entertaining me,” Vargas Llosa said. “I am very grateful to this book because I enjoyed writing it. To write for me is not always pleasant. This book for me is one of the exceptions. I really had great fun writing this book.”

His political opponents may have objected to the plot, in which Don Rigoberto is deeply in love with his second wife, Dona Lucrecia--and so is Don Rigoberto’s prepubescent son, Alfonso.

Intrigued by the notion of devoting himself to baroque prose, Vargas Llosa said he had intended for many years to write an erotic novel.

“In my (earlier) novels, my style is generally very functional,” Vargas Llosa said. “It is important for the language to be invisible.” But in writing an erotic novel, “I thought it was necessary for the prose to be a very visible presence.”

This form was important to Vargas Llosa, “because I thought that was the only way an erotic novel could avoid vulgarity. That is what I hate about modern erotic literature, the vulgarity.”

Vargas Llosa always researches his books. In the case of “In Praise of the Stepmother,” he focused mainly on paintings, some of which are reprinted in the book, and on 18th-Century erotic literature. His research is “a very large kind of thing,” Vargas Llosa said, because “I don’t think there is something you can call an isolated enclave of literature. I think a novel is something in which human experience can be expressed as a whole.”

His belief that “in life, you never have one experience completely isolated” supports his feeling that “In Praise of the Stepmother” is “not exclusively about physical love. It is also about rituals, about paintings, about utopia--and also the way in which an individual can use the richness of love to achieve it.”

There have been small incidents of censorship with this book in the United States. Several newspapers have cropped the book cover picture when it is used in illustrations so that female breasts are not shown. This response causes Vargas Llosa to bristle.

“I don’t think there is any reason to be ashamed to write a novel about erotica, about physical love, if you write it with the same artistic carefulness as you write about another theme,” Vargas Llosa said.

His book stands also as a kind of social record, he said.

“In a novel, the history of nations is always represented. Not only the official history, but also the private history. What people dreamed and thought, their private goals.

“What you express in a novel are not only the truths of a society, but also the lies,” Vargas Llosa said. “But I think the truths and the lies are equally representative of society.”

The Peruvian government’s attempts to erode Vargas Llosa’s popularity as a writer may have backfired, he said, “because books are not only entertainment in Peru. People still believe--call it naive--that in books they are going to find answers.

“That is maybe why in Third World countries, writers are being asked to participate in politics,” Vargas Llosa said. “I think they see writers as writers were seen in the 19th Century in Europe--like seers, the consciousness of a society.”

For Vargas Llosa, that is probably a good thing. “I think this can be said to be the role of literature, that it makes people more alert, more aware, that it encourages them to grasp,” he said.

Conversely, if writers and literature are viewed on some lofty plane, at least in Third World countries, writers “have a moral obligation to participate in the public debate about what are the issues and the solutions for problems,” Vargas Llosa said.

“I would like writers to be the defenders of liberty because they are the beneficiaries of it. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.”

“Ideally, the writer should be a defender of freedom,” he went on. “And also he should speak for people who cannot speak for themselves.”

Vargas Llosa said he seldom says “never.” But to the thought of another run for political office, the word comes quickly. Vargas Llosa answered confidently: “Never.”