5 ideas
Vargas Llosa compares the calling to write with a tapeworm (solitaria) that lives inside the host and feeds on everything it eats. The writer does not practise literature so much as get consumed by it: the vocation takes over time, experience and appetite, and it cannot be satisfied or switched off. On this account, vocation is a lifelong subordination, and any payoff from success or recognition is incidental.
A novel's prose should be judged by whether it makes readers believe the story, not by grammatical correctness or elegance. That persuasiveness comes from internal coherence, where every element obeys the world's own rules, and from necessity, where the language feels like the only possible form for that material. An 'incorrect' or ornate style succeeds if it closes the distance between words and events so that readers forget they are reading.
Every novel is built from three separable perspectives. The spatial one sets where the narrator stands relative to the story: first, second or third person. The temporal one sets the narrator's time relative to the narrated time. The level-of-reality one sets whether the narration is realistic or fantastic, objective or subjective. Any change in one of these is a 'shift', and a shift is either gradual or an abrupt 'qualitative leap', such as Gregor Samsa waking as an insect. The narrator is always an invented character, even in first person.
A narrator can leave out crucial information on purpose, so that the gap charges everything that is told and forces the reader to supply it. Vargas Llosa separates two kinds of omission. An elliptical hidden fact is merely delayed and later revealed. A hermetic one is never stated, as in Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants', where the word abortion never appears. The omitted datum's power comes from the reader's active inference.
In Madame Bovary, Rodolphe seduces Emma from a window above the agricultural fair, and Flaubert intercuts his romantic clichés with the official's pompous speeches and prize announcements for manure and livestock. Vargas Llosa calls this technique 'communicating vessels': two episodes separated in space or time are fused so each contaminates the other. The effect is that the seduction reads as just as hollow as the bureaucratic rhetoric, a meaning neither scene would carry alone.