This past November Mario Vargas Llosa published in Alfaguara, his publishing house, an exceptional book,
El fuego de la imaginación
, whose content encompasses a life dedicated to writing about others, from Gabriel García Márquez to Héctor Abad Faciolince.
An immense list (the book, prepared by Carlos Granés, has 789 pages) that denotes his generosity as a reader, his way of seeing the new and the very new come, without disdaining the very old and the forgotten, with
a passion that he does not know borders
;
Naturally, neither are ideological borders, because, as in Shakespeare's saying, everyone fits in his field of curiosity.
He is a reader, and he also writes books.
In airplanes, an air item that he hates, he sits against the ticket, in front of the glass that overlooks the void, and there
he reads and reads as if there were no other journey
than the one he undertakes through the pages, until he reaches his destination, which is also to continue reading.
That fire of imagination that includes everything that other pens have written is
a general chronicle of his gaze on books.
And about life, naturally.
Now his son Álvaro has placed him on Twitter reading the first edition of
Madame Bovary, the novel whose reading definitively oriented his life in the torrent of fiction
when he was still a young immigrant in Paris.
Faced with that photo, people came to mind, instead of the young writer who was reliving an old reading experience, the image of
an older man who already reads as if he were spelling
.
Some events had happened in the environment that once again put him in a private, extraliterary arena, but all those who wanted to treat him that way sought a way to gossip, even in his way of using gloves, a hood or other articles against the laws of the icy cold of Madrid de these harsh and recent times.
Shortly before that extraordinary compilation of his writing on the work of others appeared, Vargas Llosa published in the same publishing house his
reading of all the novels by Pérez Galdós
, one by one, without presuming to be a professor or treatise writer, not even a colleague. of Don Benito.
He again he was a reader, as of old.
That's what he is, a reader who grabs a book and doesn't let go and at the end writes it down as if he were concluding an exam that he sometimes also takes on himself.
Those who want him and those who would like him in another or non-existent galaxy, argued before that Progaldosian publication academic regulations and other contemporary drawbacks, without getting to the bottom (which is also the surface) of its purpose:
to read Galdós as everyone reads him. world
, without making the syntactic obligations of the academy an impediment to say what he wanted from an author to whom he dedicated, with generosity, a rare effort for a man who is approaching ninety.
He presented the book, in this case, and the journalists who went to see how he explained it at the Ateneo de Madrid treated him as if he were a beginner full of reasons to already be considered
someone worthy of literary despondency
on the stage .
A guy out of the game.
Journalists like any other, like this journalist, felt that it was time to teach the Peruvian a lesson, and they put him in the position of explaining his lightness or contradictions.
He was elegant, as is natural for him, because
I have never seen him lose his composure
: he listens, smiles and shuts up when he doesn't know what kind of fencing he is being subjected to.
This way of treating Vargas Llosa, with him present or far away, has made no difference, it has also shown itself to his very free (so they should be, it would be reasonable) political positions, which
have gone from being left-wing to being conservative
, sometimes so radically conservative as they wish, since no one owns the border that anyone chooses to say this or that based on the freedoms that seem best to them.
But since he comes from being from the other side, he has even received an identity card
on this other border
, which, by the way, also allows him to vote in Spain.
As it is not from our string, it is usually said from the left, we do not read it
;
what's more, we say that we don't read it (nor the articles!) because it's no longer one of ours, with which humanity has decided that silence should fall on him (except for his private life, to which he given, precisely, even in the identity card) associates Vargas Llosa with the cancellation of all securities, with what the word cancellation now means precisely.
The recent circumstances of his personal life (his abandonment of the home in which he lived with Isabel Preysler, a relationship that has ended) have brought to the present day the sum of disdain that, arbitrarily, has cascaded down on the author of The Fish in the water (his book, an autobiography, more beautiful).
Dictated by some omniscient factor
from gossip literature
, they said that a story from two years ago was his
loving self
-death , they explained that he was helpless at home, recovering, they attributed small deaths and invented resurrections to him, they pushed him to make statements that he did not do, or they underlined half words that he said getting out of the cars to step on the icy surface of the streets.
They chased him like he was a fugitive
, when returning home at night, to always ask him the same thing.
Anything he said, even if it was good night or goodbye, was pointed out on the various sentimental news shows supported by the nature of speculation.
They invented everything.
He would not have had, perhaps, to invent his novels in this way.
Now, this very week, this creator who is above all a reader is being received at the French Academy in
an exceptional gesture for a foreign writer.
This occurs in homage to his literature, to the values that he has exhibited writing and reading, to the fire with which he has committed himself, since he was a boy who read love poems in books stolen from his mother, to be above all a man wounded by literature.
Now the wound that awaits him every day, in the
gossip press
and also in which he pretends not to be but is equally from the heart of darkness, is iniquitous, base, dictated by the most abject of propositions: the one that allows the lie is true if it suits us that what is invention or meanness is true, or nothing between two poor loaves, as long as it pleases the one who waits for it or uses it.
Until then, until that French dominance of literature, the Spanish-American obsessions of canceling Vargas Llosa for what he says or what he
does will surely not reach
, as if that all-encompassing cancellation awaits him even before he says anything.
Sergio Ramírez said in an article he published in El País, in the midst of the
recent admonition battles against the Nobel.
“He is not a good or a bad writer according to political opinions or identifications, although they cause discomfort in some, and rejection in others.
(...) If I don't agree with those positions [political, in this case], they irritate me, and I would like the writer Vargas Llosa to think differently, that he think as I think.
But that's not why I cancel it.
The cancellation is reactionary, because it denies freedom, and annuls divergence.
I am ceasing to be a reader to become a censor.
Or, worse, becoming a political reader, who only finds comfort, not pleasure, in reading authors with whom I identify myself.
That salutary
hymn to the freedom to read
, and to write, naturally, is not in style now, and one of the victims of the present darkness is the author of El fuego de la imaginación, which perhaps people don't comment on in case it is, in Instead of a book of almost a thousand pages, a newspaper article of about a thousand words written by someone they have decided not to read in case he contradicts or convinces them.
look too
Inclusive or exclusive language?
New date of Harry Potter in symphonic version with the Orchestra of the Teatro Colón