Illuminating Our Sense Of History
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Just why is historical fiction so annoying? Besides the horror of antique dialect, there is a deeper misgiving, a sense that the novelist has cheated. Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa defines fiction thus: “It is life as it wasn’t, life as the men and women of a certain age wanted to live it and didn’t and thus had to invent.” But a historical novel does the opposite: It gives in to life as it was.
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