Mario Vargas Llosa, during his speech at the 2019 Francisco Umbral Book of the Year Award for his work 'Hard Times' in Madrid, last Monday, November 16.EUROPA PRESS / M.FERN NDEZ.
POOL
Mario Vargas Llosa has done a memory exercise on a large part of his work with which, he confesses, he has ended up surprised and even puzzled.
The Nobel Prize has recalled how he devised the character who recreates Alejandro Esparza Zañartu, the fearsome head of military repression during the Ochenio dictatorship of Manuel Odría, in
The City of Dogs
.
He has relived his first trip to the Peruvian Amazon where he met the storytellers who would later appear in
Pantaleón and the Visitors
or
El Hablador
.
He has done it through three books of lectures, talks and interviews that the editor and writer José Lázaro publishes for the first time in Spain on the Triacastela label under the title
Complete Sobras
, a play on words that the philosopher Fernando Savater gave them.
“We could define them as the marginal texts of a writer that are not included in his complete works
:
letters, notes, interviews ... Sometimes these texts are so important that, like Flaubert's private correspondence, they end up entering later editions of the Works Complete, ”Lazaro assured in a meeting with the Peruvian Hispanic writer on Wednesday afternoon through Zoom.
In this case it is
The Reality of a Writer
, a series of lectures;
Dialogues in Peru
,
which brings together 38 conversations between the author and various Peruvian journalists from 1964 to 2019, and "an essay in dialogue" between the Nobel Prize winner and Savater, under the title
Parallel Vias: Vargas Llosa y Savater
.
"Minor works by major authors that offer unusual illuminations of what is the core of their work," added the editor about the collection.
Vargas Llosa: "I have made an effort so that the Nobel did not bury me"
Thirty years
Vargas Llosa receives the Francisco Umbral award for 'Hard Times'
The interviews that are compiled in
Dialogues of Peru
are for the author a very precise and exhaustive way of exploring the uniqueness of the geography of his country and the sources with which he was constructing his first novels.
“The editor Jorge Coaguila adds many notes explaining who are the people who appear in each of the questions they ask me and the answers I give.
In this way he gives details about the characters in the books, causing closeness between reality and fiction with smiling notes, with a sense of humor and other more serious and historical ”, explained Vargas Llosa.
When the Cervantes Prize winner also reread the lectures he gave at Syracusa University in New York - "in the nineties of the last century", he pointed out - he remembered a writer who had to conscientiously prepare classes in a language that was not hers and before an audience - "very young and provincial", he described - which had a hard time locating their country, Peru, on the map.
This circumstance has not only transported him to that challenge, it has also allowed him to travel to certain moments in Peruvian history with a great profusion of detail, a necessary requirement for his students to understand, for example, what human exploitation was like in the jungles Peruvians where their compatriots "isolated themselves to survive."
The author of
Conversation in the Cathedral
has also done an exercise in personal introspection by recalling his conversation with Savater, “an independent intellectual”, in his words.
Although the philosopher has been very reluctant to allow Lázaro to put his work and that of Vargas Llosa on the same level, the editor and his authors have found a meeting point: "To think is to change your ideas."
"We are what we have been in our life despite the contradictions and denials," said Vargas Llosa.
“I am very sorry that I believed in certain things, but I did.
It would be ridiculous to deny them because now I have another way of thinking ”, he continued, giving as an example what it meant to end his adolescence at the same time that the Odría dictatorship in Peru ended.
And how those political ideas of the youth were transformed.
“The result of this evolution is what constitutes a human being.
A writer has no right to deny his past, if he has changed his way of thinking he has to explain it ”, he added.
An idea with which he has remembered Sartre, one of his greatest influences during his youth.
"He thought that literature was an illumination regarding social and political problems, due to its more permanent, less immediate vision of reality."
"It turns out that Spain does not have an official language"
Asked about the ERC demand, with the support of United We Can and the approval of the PSOE, that Spanish disappear as a "vehicular language of education" in the text of the new Education law, Mario Vargas Llosa has assured that "it is an idiocy without limits, a nonsense that should lead us to laugh ”, the same that he has uttered. “From all this it follows that Spain does not have an official language. What about the 500 million Spanish speakers? How do we tell Mexicans that Spain has no language?