Mario Vargas Llosa Why Literature
Ping Weafer
Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most important and outstanding contemporary authors writing in Spanish. He studied Literature and Law in Peru and obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy and Literature in Madrid. He later lived in Paris, London and Barcelona, contributing to several periodicals and teaching literature. With La ciudad y los perros, the novel that, in 1963, won the Premio Biblioteca Breve and the Premio de la Crtica, he achieved international recognition and became one of the most important representatives of the so-called boom in Latin American fiction. In parallel, he had a controversial political career, which culminated when he was a candidate for President of Peru in the 1990 elections. His extensive body of literary work, which is characterised by technical experimentation and the innovation of stylistic and narrative possibilities, is one of the most solid and complete of the writers of his generation. He has been awarded innumerable prizes, the most noteworthy of which were the Premio Prncipe de Asturias in 1986, the Premio Cervantes in 1994 and the Nobel prize for Literatura in 2010. In 2023 he has been elected member of the Acadmie Franaise.
Mario Vargas Llosa's journalistic work is marked by essential texts on the culture, politics, history, and social reality of Peru. Reading this volume reveals the deep connection the Nobel Prize-winning author has with his country.
Too Azpilcueta breathes and lives for Creole music and he is unquestionably its greatest authority and collector in Peru. But instead of this finding him a place among the Lima intelligentsia, he is only able to contribute with his vast knowledge to trashy magazines that pay him a pittance.
One night Too attends a soire to listen to a guitarist he has never heard of. His name is Lalo Molfino and, as soon as the first chords sound, Too realizes that he is listening to someone of astonishing talent. In his write-up, he predicts a successful career for Lalo Molfino, but some time later he finds out that the musician has died in the Hospital Obrero in complete anonymity. How could the greatest guitarist in the history of Peru become destitute? Who was Lalo Molfino? Why doesn't anyone seem to remember his name or his music?
Too embarks on a journey into the heart of Peru, determined to write a book about Lalo Molfino that he also hopes will be a great book about the culture of his country in the light of Creole music. The music that emerged in the poorest back streets of Lima and worked the miracle of uniting, perhaps for the first time, all Peruvians under the same sky.
Guatemala, 1954. The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo rbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that rbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.
In this thrilling novel, Mario Vargas Llosa fuses reality with two fictions: that of the narrator, who freely re-creates characters and situations, and the one designed by those who would control the politics and the economy of a continent by manipulating its history.
"Vargas Llosa has constructed a compelling and propulsive literary thriller, deeply informed by his experience as a public intellectual and a practicing politician." Hari Kunzru, The New York Times
As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and his secret life as a gay man ....
Vargas Llosa, with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative, takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo and Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor.
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her.
Flora Tristn, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty and journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return in 1844, she makes her name as a champion of the downtrodden, touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers' Union.In 1891, Flora's grandson, struggling painter and stubborn visionary Paul Gauguin, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works. Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this double portrait, a rare study in passion and ambition, as well as the obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of illness and death.
Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic, and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own.
In this masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.
Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love triangle: Don Rigoberto himself, by day a gray insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast; his second wife, Lucrecia; and his young son, Alfonso. Husband and wife are estranged because of a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and the boy, a fey, angelic creature who may have seduced her (rather than the other way around). Missing Lucrecia terribly, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies, and unsent letters; meanwhile the boy visits Lucrecia, determined to regain her favor and win her love. The resulting novel, an intoxicating mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling.
In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomas have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tomas entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men.
In Praise of the Stepmother is the story of Don Rigoberto, his second wife, Lucrecia, and his son, Alfonso. Their family life together seems to be a happy one. Rigoberto, an insurance company manager, spends his time preening himself for his wife and collecting erotic art. But while Lucrecia is devoted to him, she has her own needs, and soon finds herself the object of young Alfonso's attention.
With meticulous observation and seductive skill, Mario Vargas Llosa explores the mysterious nature of happiness. Little by little, the harmony of his characters is darkened by the shadow of perversion.
At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer comes across a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the Amazon jungle. As he stares at the photograph, it dawns on him that he knows this man. The storyteller is not an Indian at all but his university classmate, Saul Zuratas, who was thought to have disappeared in Israel. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas' transformation into a member of the Machiguenga tribe.
Peru, 1950s. A young airman is found brutally murdered near an Air Force base in the northern desert. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma set out to investigate, hitching rides on chicken trucks and cajoling a cab driver into taking them to the crime scene. Without support from their superiors and with the base's commanding officer standing in their way, the case won't be easy. But they are determined to uncover the truth.
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