Vargas Llosa criticizes Putin and extols democracy upon entering the French Academy

The Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa entered the French Academy this Thursday with a speech in which he criticized the Russia of Vladimir Putin and advocated democracy.

At the age of 86, the Arequipa-born writer became the first author in a non-French language to access that institution founded in 1635.

His speech equally addressed his passion for literature, particularly French, and politics, particularly the denunciation of authoritarianism.

“The novel will save democracy or it will sink with it and disappear”, said the new “Immortal”, as French academics are known.

“This caricature that totalitarian countries sell us as novels will always remain, but that only exists after having gone through the censorship that mutilates them” as shown by “the example of Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” he criticized.

“We see how he attacks the unfortunate Ukraine, and how he is greatly surprised when this nation resists, despite its military superiority, its atomic bombs and its massive troops.”, he added.

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The closing of a circle

Dressed in a black frock coat embroidered with green motifs, as tradition dictates, Vargas Llosa closed a circle in the venerable institution on the banks of the Seine that began in 1959, when he landed in Paris as a young and almost unknown author.

When he was studying in Lima, he recalled, “I secretly aspired to become a French writer. He was convinced that it was impossible to be a writer in Peru, a country without publishers and few bookstores.”, he explained.

Upon arrival, he discovered to his surprise that in “the cultural capital of the worldAuthors such as the Mexican Octavio Paz have been read for a long time.

“It was therefore thanks to France that I discovered another Latin America“, said.

Vargas Llosa bought a copy of “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert as soon as he arrived in the French capital.

He worked as a translator, as a language teacher, “as well as at the Agence France Presse, in the place de la Bourse”, recalled the author of “La fiesta del chivo” before the audience.

“It was in Paris that I became a writer”, he added. “Without Flaubert I would never have been the writer that I am, nor would I have written what I have written. It is rather thanks to him that you receive me today”, he acknowledged.

“I would like to return the compliments”, said academic Daniel Rondeau in his reply speech.

“Starting in the 1970s, it was South American writers who helped a new generation of French writers not to despair of fiction literature,” he said.

The last survivor of the Latin American “boom” generation, Vargas Llosa is the author of novels that have marked Hispanic letters in the 20th century, such as “Conversation in the Cathedral” or “La ciudad y los perros”.

With this historic reception, the Academy leaves aside the fact that Vargas Llosa expresses himself in the language of Cervantes, and the criticism collected in some French media for the political positions of the person who was a candidate for the presidency of Peru.

“This is their home, this tribe of stubborn, ephemeral immortals” Rondeau concluded.

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Vargas Llosa: “In France I began to feel like a Latin American writer”

Juan Carlos I among the guests

Vargas Llosa is already a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, the Peruvian and the Brazilian, and has attended numerous international forums on the Spanish language over the years.

The French Academy has a function similar to the Spanish one: it publishes a dictionary, issues style recommendations and clears up linguistic doubts.

In recent years it has had some difficulties in recruiting new members.

Among the guests of thefacility” of the Nobel Prize, as it is known in the language of the Academy, was the Spanish King Emeritus Juan Carlos I, accompanied by his daughter, the Infanta Cristina.

Vargas Llosa, who was named Marquis by Juan Carlos I in 2011, personally invited the former monarch, who lives in the United Arab Emirates, and who has only officially left that country on a few occasions since his controversial withdrawal from Spain, in 2020.

Source: AFP