quality:correction
Interlacing dialogues

Literary scholar M. Keith Booker argues that Vargas Llosa perfects the technique of interlacing dialogues in his novel The Green House. By combining two conversations that occur at different times, he creates the illusion of a flashback. Vargas Llosa also sometimes uses this technique as a means of shifting location by weaving together two concurrent conversations happening in different places. This technique is a staple of his repertoire, which he began using near the end of his first novel, The Time of the Hero. However, he does not use interlacing dialogues in the same way in all of his novels. For example, in The Green House the technique is used in a serious fashion to achieve a sober tone and to focus on the interrelatedness of important events separated in time or space. In contrast, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service employs this strategy for comic effects and uses simpler spatial shifts. This device is similar to both Virginia Woolf 's mixing of different characters' soliloquies and Gustave Flaubert's counterpoint technique in which he blends together conversation with other events, such as speeches. This was seen to occur yet again in Vargas Llosa's most current work, "Tiempos Recios," as two dialogues, one between Trujillo and Castillo Armas, and another between Trujillo and Abbes García, are juxtaposed.