Mario Vargas Llosa, in his official and solemn welcome as a member of the French Academy, this Thursday in Paris, gave a speech of deep admiration for French culture and exaltation of the craft of storytelling and the pleasure of reading. “A life without literature would be horrible, sinister, stripped of the richest and most diverse experiences of life, an intolerable routine, made of obligations that would be repeated every day as a set of commitments with no promise of remission,” he has stated.
The 86-year-old Nobel Prize winner for literature has been supported by his three children – Gonzalo, Álvaro and Morgana – and by his ex-wife, Patricia Llosa. The ceremony, under the dome of the monumental Institute of France, a stone’s throw from the Seine, on the ‘rive gauche’, was attended by King Emeritus, Juan Carlos I, accompanied by the Infanta Cristina. Among the guests was former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and his wife, Susana Gallardo.
The Spanish-Peruvian writer was elected a member of the French Academy, a venerable institution created by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, in November 2021. He obtained 18 votes in favor, one against, one white and two null. He caused some controversy by being the first to enter this cultural Olympus without having published original work in French. Vargas Llosa occupies the seat that became vacant due to the death of the philosopher Michel Serres.
The life secretary of the Academy, the historian expert in Russia Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, downplayed the controversy surrounding Vargas Llosa. In a statement to the AFP agency before the ceremony on Thursday, Carrère d’Encausse emphasized the writer’s interest in his role as an academic. “He constantly makes comments to us; he is passionate about it,” she said.
Vargas Llosa was dressed in the mandatory greenish suit with golden ornaments. His speech, about twenty pages long, was prepared with the help of the novelist’s French translator, Albert Benoussan.
The Nobel Prize evoked his childhood and youth in Peru, already marked by his interest in French culture. “I was convinced that it would be impossible to be a writer in Peru, a country without publishing houses and few bookstores, where the writers I knew were almost all lawyers who worked in their office all week and wrote their poems only on Sundays,” he said. . I wanted to write every day, like real writers did. That is why I dreamed of France and Paris”.
Vargas Llosa cited his brief stint in the Communist Party in Peru and the revealing period in Paris, not only about literature but about the reality of Latin America. “It was then in France, what a paradox!, where I began to feel like a Peruvian and Latin American writer,” he said.
The author of ‘The City and the Dogs’ highlighted the importance of having discovered Gustave Flaubert, “who was and will always be my teacher”. Vargas Llosa repeated the anecdote that he bought ‘Madame Bovary’ the very night he arrived in Paris, in 1959, in a bookstore in the Latin Quarter, La Joie de Lire, now defunct.
The new French academic briefly referred to the war in Ukraine, in a very harsh tone towards Putin. He predicted that, “just like in novels”, also in this case “the weak triumph over the strong”, given “the infinitely greater justice” of their cause. “The novel will save democracy or it will deteriorate with it and disappear,” he predicted. “Literature needs freedom to exist and when it does not exist, it resorts to secrecy to make it possible, since you cannot live without it, just as air is essential for the lungs,” he argued. For Vargas Llosa, of freedom literary others are born, such as changing the government or simply criticizing it, discussing and voting.
“What will become of literature in the future?” asked the Nobel Prize winner. “Whatever we want, of course,” he replied. Could it disappear? It would be possible, without a doubt. But a world without dreams would be poor and one of the saddest, a world without adventures, boring and sinister, a world orchestrated by the powerful and subject to their constant surveillance. It’s not what we want. On the contrary, literature must continue to explore life and death, to set new frontiers for the imagination, for the imagination of human beings, without forgetting the rich mass of dreams and unrealities that it has left behind.
