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The death of Mario Vargas Llosa, at 89, leads a literary era. Last big survivor of the “boom” generation of the 1960s and 70s, which push Latin American on a world scene, the Peruvian author – with the friend who has become rival Gabriel García Márquez – has undermined the culture and politics of his region for stories that have pierced the world.
The two began with a mission to make innovative literature a weapon against a cruel and suffocating social order. But the liberal of Arequipa became a firm admirer of Margaret Thatcher: I saw once the anti-vargas Llosa demonstrators with the posters of Buenos Aires Fair Brand with photos of their handshake. Meanwhile, the Colombian radical hung on to the revolutionary faith of Cuba de Castro.
In his work, however, Vargas Llosa, the polemicist gave in to the artist who transformed utopian dreams – and hopes into dotted – from Latin America into a constant and inspiring theme. Through literary registers that extend from erotic comedy to an epic historical thriller with a deep state, he has drawn the thoughtless will to make a richer life, a fairer world. He also showed the forces that can thwart him. For him, these blocks derive not only from the local corrupt elites or the foreign powers interfering, but also of capricious humanity.
However, this skeptical, even tragic perspective, took place through a long series of exuberant, visionary, often carefully entertaining books. Here are five who will direct the readers through its turbulent continent, conflicting and constantly evolving.
Conversation in the cathedral (1969, translated by Gregory Rabassa). This third ambitious novel has apparently helped push Vargas Llosa on the line for the 2010 Nobel Prize In literature. The “cathedral” is a dirty bar in Lima from the 1950s, where the son of a minister, and his driver, meet to discuss – and discover – the secrets of the Rapace Rapace of Peru. From the revolt of the son against a tyrant father to the race and the class of class and to the deadly attractions of power, Vargas Llosa explores the reasons which reproduce throughout his work. He does it via the polyphonic dialogue that overlaps and intertwined that he also made. Looking liable to the pioneers of “boom”, such as Alejo Carpentier and Julio Cortázar, the novel corresponds to the stylistic audacity to social criticism.
Aunt Julia and the screenwriter (1977, translated by Helen Lane). After having (scandalously) married her uncle's sister-in-law, Vargas Llosa survived for a while as a piracy for rental. His pleasure for life in the Latin American soap opera and his labyrinstral melodramas propels this intelligent, funny and Ribaissant double story. The increasingly bizarre radio plots of Pedro Camacho punctuate the Young Marito affair with his parent. Reality and fantasy come into force while the novel pays its tribute to the liberating power of art (even humble). But then, the facts and fiction are often tangled for Vargas Llosa: when he presented himself to the presidency, the adversaries read hot passages of Aunt Julia to discredit it.
War of the end of the world (1981, translated by Helen Lane). Painted as a large dark canvas, this radical historical novel tells the ecstatic origins and the blood -soaked final of a peasant revolt that convulted Brazil of the 1890s. In the Cannudos war, the people of the country desperate in Bahia followed a charismatic preacher, and his dreams of heaven on earth, in a catastrophic conflict with the laic forces of Brazil. The long quarrel of Vargas Llosa with utopian tension in Latin American life finds its most full expression here. At the end of the apocalyptic rainbow, it is not a joyful uprising but suffering and death. Beauty and horror intertwine, but we never lose sight of the oppression that pushes desperate people to potential messiahs.
A fish in water (1993, translated by Helen Lane). The candidate for a liberal and pro-market alliance, in 1990, Vargas Llosa became president of Peru. His failure, in the hands of Alberto FujimoriThe brand of twisted but cunning populism would give birth to one of its most pleasant books. Memoirs alternate the consumed scenes of the privileged youth but insecurity of the writer with erectional, but optimistic relationships of the campaign track. Vargas Llosa, with his platform for civic and economic freedoms, really got closer: he directed the vote in the first round. His opponent quickly turned out to be a vicious gangster, later sentenced to a sentence of 25 years in prison. However, the sparkling energy and the artistic talent of this chronicle of defeat make the reader very happy to have lost.
The goat party (2000, translated by Edith Grossman). It is not enough to denounce the attractive strong men who have stripped Latin American societies over two centuries; Writers must understand and transmit their appearance. In his masterful point of view of the “dictators novel”, Vargas Llosa does. Rafael Trujillo's career (1891-1961), for three decades of the deadly despot of the Dominican Republic, propels a twisted and galloping story. It describes the dynamics of deception and control on a public and domestic scale. A figure of abusive authority to his nation and young victims, the “goat” embodies “enthronement, by propaganda and violence, of a monstrous lie”. Vargas Llosa reinvents events in the middle of the 20th century but insists that dictatorial dangers persist: “Something of these times is always in the air.”
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