Noticias
On March 28th, the Spanish Peruvian writer will turn 80
Mario Vargas Llosa gathers a polished style, conciseness, imaginative structures and revealing dialogues: David Martín del Campo
March 26, 2016Peruvian writer nationalized Spanish Mario Vargas Llosa will celebrate next March 28th his 80th birthday. Just a few weeks ago he has released his novel Cinco esquinas (Five Corners), which literary criticism praises the pen of one of the most important novelists and contemporary essayists in Spanish.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 has reached a step further of international literary recognition: in April his work will become part of the prestigious library of La Pleiade, the French publisher Gallimard, which brings together the universal literary canon (600 titles of 200 authors from different countries), a privilege only achieved so far by two Latin American writers: Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz.
"People think that the Nobel kills you, but I'm still alive", this writer, who was born on March 28th 1936 in the city of Arequipa, Peru, and since 1993 was nationalized Spanish, said in recent days. But when receiving the Nobel prize he said: "What I do, what I say, expresses the country where I was born, the country where I lived, the fundamental experiences that make a human being, which are the childhood and youth, so Peru it's me. I can thank my country what I am, being a writer. "
Vargas Llosa will celebrate his birthday in Madrid, with a party in which over 300 guests who include six former presidents of the government and some Nobel laureates are expected. As part of the celebrations on March 29th and 30th, the International Freedom Foundation, an organization chaired by the writer, will organize an international seminar in the House of America in which panelists, as former presidents, journalists and philosophers will discuss the future of Latin America.
Mario Vargas Llosa has written about 20 novels, story books, children's stories, 18 plays, an autobiography, and several essays, political analysis and reflections on the profession of writing.
This author, who has said that before sitting down to write he tries to have almost all thought and researched, he does not stop being an inventor of reality, who has achieved in Cinco esquinas (Five Corners) a story of Peru during the government of Alberto Fujimori, a corrupt regime beseiged by violence, a stark portrait and a passionate allegation for freedom of the press, where the maneuvers of the regime overlap to a tinged sex comedy story.
"Open the latest Vargas Llosa’s novel, read the first 10 pages and tell me that the gentleman is not fully fit. The perfect start with a sustained, compact, deliciously lascivious rhythm is at the height of his best novels. Then, that narrative architecture comes, easy to lift only apparently, which does fit much of what distinguishes him as a great novelist: sexual provocation full of sarcasm; the political chronicle in real historical contexts that without being a reflection helps us to make it", Mexican writer Julio Patan says in an article.
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa's parents, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Cries Ureta, separated months before his birth, so he spent his childhood between Cochabamba (Bolivia) and the Peruvian cities of Piura and Lima. The divorce and subsequent reconciliation of his parents resulted in frequent changes of address and school. Until age 10, he was led to believe that his father had died, but at that age he met his father for the first time, who would be a central figure in his destiny, especially for the repulsion of his father to his literary vocation, that he never understood.
"I had a disastrous relationship with my father, and the years lived with him between 11 and 16 were a nightmare", he says. His father sent him as a boarding student to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, where he studied the 3rd and 4th year of high school bearing a tough discipline.
In his novel El pez en el agua (A Fish in the Water, 1993), he tells how he discovered the fear the day he met his father and how this "derailed" his life. Regarding his first novel La ciudad y los perros (The time of the hero) (1962) he says that he owes his father the love for freedom, "mostly because of the way he imposed his authority, and also unknowingly he was the one who gave me the subject of my first novel, for having me taken to a military school, because I turned into a professional writer there. "
A los 16 años inició su carrera literaria y periodística con el estreno del drama La huida del inca (1952). En 1953 ingresó a la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, en Lima, donde estudió letras y derecho, a pesar de desaprobación de su padre. En 1955, decidió casarse clandestinamente con Julia Urquidi, hermana de su tía política por parte materna, quien era 10 años mayor que él. Desempeñó trabajos diferentes entre los que están el de redactor de noticias en Radio Central, catalogar libros o revisar los nombres de las tumbas de un cementerio.
At 16 he began his literary and journalistic career with the premiere of the drama, La huida del inca (The Flight of the Inca) (1952). In 1953 he joined the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima, where he studied literature and law, despite his father's disapproval. In 1955, he decided to marry Julia Urdiqui clandestinely, his maternal uncle’s sister-in-law, who was 10 years older than him. He held various jobs: as news editor of Radio Central, books cataloger or checker of the names of the tombs of a cemetery.
In those years he began his literary career seriously, publishing his story, El abuelo (The Grandfather), in the newspaper El comercio in 1956, and a year later his first short stories, Los jefes (The Cubs and Other Stories; literally The leaders). In late 1957 he took part in a short story contest organized by La Revue Française, a French publication dedicated to art. His story entitled El desafío (The Challenge) won the first prize, which consisted of a visit to Paris.
In 1959 he traveled to Spain with the Javier Prado scholarship to do a PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid. He obtained the title of doctor of philosophy and letters, and decided to settle in Paris, where he worked as a professor of Spanish at the Berlitz School, French ORTF broadcaster, and France Presse journalist.
Mario Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 60's with novels such as La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero; literally, The city and the dogs, 1962); La casa verde (The Green House, 1965), which is the name of a brothel in Piura, an experimental text about misery and violence where there are many stories, fables and arguments; and Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) which begins with this question: “At what point was Peru fucked?", a work that the author places among his favorites. The protagonist, Zavalita, a journalist and a kind of writer's alter ego, maintains a four-hour conversation at the bar La Catedral with Ambrosio, a black man who works in the kennel and who was Zavalita's driver before.
From La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero; literally The city and the dogs), he was established as one of the key figures of the Latin American literature boom. Like other authors of that movement, his work broke with the directions of traditional description assuming foreign fiction innovations, and adopting techniques such as the interior monologue, the plurality of points of view or chronological fragmentation, at the service of a crude realism.
"His works represent a fortunate encounter between political concerns and artistic demands. Mario Vargas Llosa stood up from the boom as an intellectual with whom next generations would have to discuss", literary critic Christopher Domínguez Michael said in a recent article.
In 1964, the writer returned to Peru, he divorced Julia Urquidi, he made a second trip to the jungle where he collected material on the Amazon and its inhabitants, which helped him to some of his novels. In 1965 he traveled to Havana, where he was part of the jury of the House of the Americas Awards and joined the Editorial Board of the magazine Casa de las Américas until 1971, when he separated himself from the Cuban regime.
That same year he married his cousin Patricia Llosa with whom he had three children: Alvaro (1966), Gonzalo (1967) and Morgana (1974). In 1967 he worked as a translator for the United Nations Organization for Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Greece, with Julio Cortázar; and his life takes place in Europe, with alternate residences in Paris, London and Barcelona.
In 1975 he was appointed member of the Peruvian Academy of Language, and in 1976 he was elected president of PEN International, a position he held until 1979.
The novelist published La orgía perpetua (The Perpetual Orgy, 1975), an essay in which he analyzes one of the novels that marked his career as a writer, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which he considered the first modern novel and in which there is also something autobiographical. In 1977 he wrote La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), which tells the relationship with Julia Urquidi, when he was 19, a controversial love story, which helped him work with the limits between reality and fiction.
In Peru he hosted the television program La torre de Babel (The Tower of Babel) and in 1983 he chaired the Investigatory Commission on the Uchuraccay case dedicated to solve the murder of eight journalists. In the late eighties he entered the world of politics in Peru as an advocate of liberal ideas, in 1987 he emerged as a commanding leader of the Freedom Movement, which opposed the nationalization of banks proposed by the then President Alan García Pérez .
In 1990 he run for the presidency of Peru as the candidate of the center-right coalition known as Democratic Front (FREDEMO, for its contraction in Spanish). After two contended electoral processes (first and second round), he lost the election and returned to London where he resumed his literary activity.
At that time he published La verdad de las mentiras (The Truth of Lies, 1990), an essay entitled one of the favorite phrases of the author in relation to literature: "the truth of lies”, where he brought together essays about 25 novels and stories of different authors of the twentieth century.
He acquired Spanish citizenship in March 1993, without renouncing the Peruvian. In 1994 he was appointed member of the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy), and that same year he won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Literature in Spanish Language; subsequently he received an honorary doctorate at many universities. In 1996 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. The author's work La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World) (1981) has been translated into over 40 languages.
"The novel in Latin America would not be the same without Mario Vargas Llosa's work. His novels have come to demonstrate the force of literature in Spanish outside Spain. Vargas Llosa has gathered that and the reader always appreciated: the polished style, conciseness, imaginative structures, revealing dialogues and topical issues", novelist David Martín del Campo said in an interview with the Department of Culture.
"Natural heir of the best French novel (Flaubert and Stendhal) he has not only written essays to honor them, but he has assumed himself as a disciple of their narrative art in that evident joy which is 'to tell'. For good and bad, we cannot silence a fact: the most important Spanish language writer (alive), as shown by the awards he has received, including the Nobel Prize for Literature", David Martin del Campo said.
Football fan, Mario Vargas Llosa is an expert in sport statistics and during the World Cup Spain 1982, he worked as a sports journalist. He has declared himself a music lover, ensuring that feels a special fondness for Gustav Mahler. He has been visiting professor and resident writer at universities in countries such as England, the United States, Puerto Rico, Germany or Spain. He collaborates in El País, Le Monde, The New York Times and the magazine Letras Libres writing prolifically literary criticism and journalism.
Several of his novels have been taken to the big screen such as Los cachorros (The Puppies, 1967), a story that portrays the transition from childhood to maturity of a high Lima society group of boys. Pichula Cuellar is the protagonist, a child attacked and castrated by a dog at his school; Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1973), La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1962), La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977) and La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000) a story about the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, one of the cruelest man in Latin America, which took him three years of "hard" work and had another 25 years "fantasizing".
Mario Vargas Llosa has recognized that the books that took him hard work were Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral), La guerra de fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World) and La fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), because of the challenge that implied the characters' way of speaking, but recognizes that all the books took him hard work: "For me, writing is not easy," he warns.
"Like Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa managed to sublimate the semi-orphanhood where he spent his childhood. An absent father, a devoted mother, a family secret that should be revealed to him one day. The early biographies written show him as a toughness of steel writer. Cocktails, weddings, travels, yes, but above all the daily solitude before the electric machine transformed today into a computer", David Martin del Campo said.
"Mario Vargas Llosa reaches his birthday before thousands of readers, at the height of his artistic powers, owner of an unblemished reputation as a liberal fighter and man of peace and it is no big deal, as a man of his own destiny" Michael Dominguez concludes in his article in Letras Libres.
Mexico,Distrito Federal
