Abstract
This work examines some narrative strategies employed by Mario Vargas Llosa in his most recent novel, to try to transform Latin American history into fiction. Tiempos recios joins the group of his novels, which problematize the complex relationship that exists between history and literature. Selected historical facts and characters are fictionalized and become incorporated into a novelistic world invented by the author in an attempt to reveal their hidden truths. In this way he manages to fulfill his paradoxical proposal to make a novel anchored in history or reality that allows him to reach the truth but achieves it through lies or imagination.