The first book I read by Mario Vargas Llosa was Aunt Julia and the writer, at the beginning of my university life. I think I used to resist reading it, probably because as a militant of the Latin American left — so I thought, in adolescence — I viewed it with suspicion. Perhaps he was also afraid that the supposed traitor to the working class would blindside me. But Vargas Llosa had to come one day, and when that day came, he made it to stay. I don’t have a relationship of adoration or devotion to his work, but the one you have to your grandparents: a kind of sacred friendship, full of expected nostalgia, questioning and lucidity. It should be said yes Aunt Julia It is a book of initiation, a book as a calling or destiny, an accidental creative decision. Since then, like the brilliant Pedro Camacho, the writer of the radio soap operas that were in vogue in the fictitious Lima of the fifties, I have been writing. As in Salvador Elizondo’s epigraph: “I write to write.” I mentally see myself writing to write. I remember writing.”

Vargas Llosa, in a performative sense, can constitute periods of life, history or theater. A young student at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy who survives all the violence, especially his father’s, thanks to reading. One who debuts as a novelist with City and dogsreleasing with full force boom Latin American; and that, not satisfied with that, he writes the following two novels that are masterpieces of Western literature: Green house and conversation in the cathedral. The intellectual who, receiving the Rómulo Gallegos award, declared that literature is fire and that socialism will rid Latin America of anachronism and horror. A fan of Gabriel García Márquez, to whom he wrote his doctoral thesis, called the story of the murder of God, years later to hit him which would end their friendship for the rest of their lives. The one who stopped believing in the mythomania of the Cuban revolution and broke forever with the bloody dictator Fidel Castro. The liberal politician who was defeated by Fujimori in the 1990 elections, later persecuted an opponent whose Peruvian citizenship the dictatorship wanted to take away. Nobel Prize winner born in Arequipa, the greatest representative of the language of Arguedas and César Vallejo, who travels with a Spanish passport. He member of the High Society who condemned the civilization of the spectacle. The first immortal of the French Academy who never wrote in that language. The most universal of living writers.

Five interesting facts about Mario Vargas Llosa’s admission to the French Academy (and why it makes him “immortal”)

At a time when it is politically incorrect to talk about him, I return to his books as one always returns to the source. Its reading or re-reading is equal to the return of art, its complex meaning, the ax that breaks the sea of ​​ice that we carry within us. But it is also a return to lucidity and the intelligence of those who are not afraid of their own contradictions, learn something new, make mistakes and admit it. Meet the man. Today, when Latin American literature is full of progressive seekers of absolute truth, reading and admiring Vargas Llosa usually represents a political act, an intellectual and ethical autonomy. No one hated Latin American dictators as much as he did, be they left or right. Incapable of dialectics or respect for dissent, they loathe their own political statements, lucid or not. And they, the so-called progressive intellectuals, who are always wrong in their readings of the continental political reality, lack something that Vargas Llosa always guarded: free will. Even the conservative right should not celebrate him so much, because as a humanist he defends free abortion and equal marriage. In addition, he was an ardent Catholic child, then an atheist and a socialist, before finally becoming a liberal agnostic. That is, he does not believe in God or communism.

Have Mario Vargas Llosa and his ex-wife reconciled? Nobel Prize forgets Isabel Preysler and reappears with Patricia Llosa in Paris to celebrate their admission to the French Academy

I return to Vargas Llosa as I always return to literature, to the terrifying act of writing, to faith in myself. The last book of yours I read was paradise in another corner, that powerful overview of the lives of Paul Gauguin and his grandmother Flora Tristán. A reconstruction of a time in which great intellectual debates had the ability to awaken the world: the violence he suffers, in his body, is the door through which Tristán must pass in order to become aware of the insecurity that the political system leads to. and Economic tends to condemn women, making them the proletariat of the proletariat. His grandson, years later, leaves life on the Paris Stock Exchange to follow in the footsteps of his friend and guide Vincent van Gogh. Peru was a lost homeland for both of them. Gauguin seeks, first in painting, and then on his final trip to Polynesia, purity, meaning, bliss. How much is the pursuit of purity like arrogance, holiness like self-destruction? Two of the most brilliant minds in history failed to reach the paradise they always wanted; They could only think about it, for a few moments. Our only chance is to just pass the road? Isn’t our life a search for a place we don’t know exists? Isn’t it perhaps similar to a painful wandering through Latin America? Now, as Peru goes through one of the bloodiest political crises in its history, these questions are worth asking. But I choose to think that the purpose that Mario Vargas Llosa pursued during his nearly nine decades still makes sense: to make the impossible possible with words. (OR)