Bad news for followers of the only living Nobel Prize winner for literature in the Spanish language: Mario Vargas Llosa is retiring. He announced this in October with respect to fiction, when presenting his latest novel, I Dedicate My Silence to Him, and very recently with respect to columnism, by ending the opinion space that he had maintained for thirty years in El País and before in different media. Europeans and Americans.
As a novelist, his contribution has been enormous, with a special nose for detecting, and creating, rising trends. Her works from the 60s, both in large format – The City and the Dogs, The Green House – and in novel format – The Puppies – masterfully promoted the structural renewal of the genre. Offering with precocious mastery brilliant space-time combinations that altered the chronological sequence, and groundbreaking strategies such as his famous intersecting or “telescopic” dialogues (in Conversation in the Cathedral, he crosses eighteen simultaneous interlocutors), while composing a great fresco realist of Peru in the 20th century.
In 1977, with Aunt Julia and the Writer, he became a pioneer of so-called autofiction, theorized that same year by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky and in vogue to this day. At the same time author, narrator and character (Varguitas) in that novel about his work and sentimental adventures as a youth, which was then seen as a light and largely humorous work; Reread today it gives the measure of the potential it harbored.
In the year 2000, Vargas Llosa in his sixties returned to the foreground from which he had not strayed far, cultivating what Robert Saladrigas called multidisciplinary literature, which hybridizes situations, documents and characters from reality with others from the imagination.
In that line opened by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, in which M. Vázquez Montalbán had worked with Galíndez and W.G. Sebald with The Rings of Saturn; The same year that Baltasar Porcel published El cor del senglar, Vargas Llosa offered La fiesta del chivo, another of his undisputed masterpieces, about the Trujillo dictatorship in Santo Domingo, complemented fifteen years later with Tiempos recios, about the 1954 coup. in Guatemala.
Only for his contribution in these three areas he already occupies a main place in the Olympus of universal letters.
The journalistic work, collected in three thick volumes by Galaxia Gutenberg in 2012 and now recovered by Alfaguara, covers with a beautiful and enveloping style very different social, cultural and political registers, combining first-hand information, depth and anecdote, and a charge of spirit criticism that often leads to controversy.
The retirement of Vargas Llosa induces the writer of this to a certain end-of-year melancholy, since my life as a reader, and later my journalistic life, have been closely linked to his work. Still a teenager, reading his lecture Secret History of a Novel, about The Green House – the house in question was a brothel in Piura that the young Vargas had visited with his friends – allowed me to understand how one’s own experience can be transfigured into non-autobiographical creation.
A notable theorist of narrative work, his Letters to a Young Novelist are also obligatory.
I have not interviewed him as many times as Juan Cruz, nor on such notable occasions as Xavi Ayén, who caught him in New York having just received an award from the Swedes. But I have had a certain ongoing relationship with him, of which I summarize three moments.
The first was in 1988, when he published Praise of the Stepmother. He was short on time and invited me to follow him on a busy day that included his annual consultation at the Barraquer clinic, where he answered my questions while the specialists examined him and concluded that he had excellent eyesight, after making him read a paragraph from Don Quixote, quite a metaphor.
In 2013 we spoke to the public at the National Library of Spain, within the tercentenary program of this institution. “The most important thing that has happened to me in my life has been learning to read,” he said.
But among other less friendly questions, he also explained his apprenticeship at the Crónica de Lima, when at the age of fifteen he was assigned to the events section, with assignments such as covering the murder of a young woman: “It was the first time I saw a corpse and I was paralyzed.” A drastic lesson in realism.
In June 2022, I moderated a talk in Barcelona with him and Javier Cercas about their book La mira quieta de Pérez Galdós. An author – the canary – who expresses, in his opinion, “Spanish society with all its traumas”, an objective with which he inevitably sympathizes with those who have always understood the novel as “deicide”, a supreme act of creative supplantation of the reality.
The same day he had submitted to the questionnaire of Silvia Colomé and a server in the La Vanguardia podcast “The Secret Books”, and he reiterated his consideration of Don Benito as “the most important writer in 19th century Spain without a doubt.” ”.
Possibly, very possibly, Vargas Llosa is also the most important writer in the Spanish language today. I hope that the teacher’s retirement is active and allows us to continue enjoying for many years the endless conversation that a work as powerful and attractive as his has fostered.
