Mario Vargas Llosa took advantage of many hours of the pandemic to reread the work of Benito Pérez Galdós, a classic of Spanish literature. As a result of the relationship he established with the writer from the Canary Islands, his latest book was born, The Still Gaze (by Pérez Galdós), recently published by Alfaguara.
The Nobel Prize for Literature has not hesitated to add a new volume to the library of Secret Books. Its author: Pérez Galdós, “the most important writer of nineteenth-century Spain without a doubt.” The work: Fortunata and Jacinta, “the book he was most proud of and that expresses Spanish society with all its traumas,” argues the Peruvian-born author on the La Vanguardia podcast.
Vargas Llosa also highlights the leading role that the author of the National Episodes gave to the two women who give the novel its name, well above the male character, Juanito Santa Cruz, “without consistency”, who plays with them. “You could say that Pérez Galdós had a high sense of what women were worth in Spain”, he maintains, a country that he “considered small” and that he “criticized” by taking “a certain distance from him”.
The cultural podcast The Secret Books can also be heard and followed on audio platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, among others.
