Juan LePuen draws on Primo Levi's notions of purity and impurity to examine the work, both literary and extra-literary, of the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro. He argues that Ribeyro's work is characterized by its impurity and that this trait ultimately affects the reception of his work. He likewise argues that it is the impurity that characterizes Ribeyro's work and his person that, despite his lack of faith in the genre for which he is known, keeps him from yielding, as he himself might have put it, to the temptation of failure.

Genre: essay
Length: 6,300 words