Mario Vargas Llosa: The novelist who lectured Latin America

SIRMAS PRESS.- Mario Vargas Llosa is no longer from this world, but his monumental work survives him as an imperishable flame. In fact, in one of his books, The Fire of the Imagination (compilation of articles, notes and essays on literature, cinema and art), the Nobel Prize in Peruvian Literature summarized the literary vocation as a “fire, nonconformism, rebellion.” For him, the writer is a “eternal poaching party.” What did Vargas Llosa mean …

During his rich life, Mario Vargas Llosa committed only one mistake: trying a dangerous political career in a country, Peru, ravaged by the Marxist guerrillas of the Shining Path. His defeat in the presidential election of 1990, against the imperious Alberto Fujimori, rejoiced his readers who feared to lose one of the most sparkling writers of the 20th century. Born in Arequipa on 28 March 1936, Vargas Llosa grew up on a continent where the imag…

I met Porfirio Muñoz Ledo in Strasbourg, in his step as Ambassador of Mexico to the European Union. He rebuked me at the time about my closeness to the National Action Party (PAN). He told me that an intellectual, qualifier with whom I do not identify, should not commit to any ideology. “Look at me,” he stressed. He referred to his step because of how much political party existed in Mexico. “There is no worse thing than an organic intellectual […

Mario Vargas Llosa: The novelist who lectured Latin America

Fact and fiction circled each other in the works of Mario Vargas Llosa. Through realism, erotica, and even crude slang, the Peruvian novelist wove tales of political corruption and moral compromise. As part of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s—alongside Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez and Argentina's Julio Cortázar—he reached international fame, winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2010. But unlike most other regional giants, h…

What is more true: a dictator of flesh and blood or the one who invents a novel? Vargas Llosa had an answer. The post The truth of truths appeared first on Free Letters.

The author of Vargas Llosa. His other great passion valued the media reception of his work in several countries and celebrated the posthumous tribute that will be paid to the writer at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.