Mario Vargas Llosa
, a Peruvian writer, entered the French Academy this Thursday, about to turn 87.
He did it with a speech in which
he claimed for the novel
, the art that led him to the Nobel Prize in 2010,
a decisive role in the past and in the future of humanity
.
Gustave Flaubert was his mirror and in this act was his odd companion.
Five steps, or six chairs, stood to listen to the
King Emeritus of Spain, Juan Carlos I
, who was interested in making this trip from Abu Dhabi, where he lives, to attend this tribute to the writer who, as the author pointed out of the laudatio, owes, with Felipe González, the Spanish nationality since 1993.
Before the authorities of the main literary institution in the country that he adopted as his writer's reference in 1959, and before his entire family, that Zavalita who helped him to mix experience and fiction in
Conversation in the Cathedral
expressed his passion for
the novel as an element inherent in democracy.
It is the first time that the Vargas Llosa family attends an official Nobel activity in full since he left home eight years ago to maintain a relationship with
Isabel Preysler.
In the same line as the emeritus monarch was
Patricia Llosa
, the mother of their children, as well as grandchildren and relatives.
Before the ceremony, the greatest interest was focused on the arrival of the emeritus.
They approached him, timidly at first, academic or political representatives of the Spanish excursion to pay homage to Vargas Llosa.
There were the president of the Spanish Academy,
Santiago Muñoz Machado,
the president of the Teatro Real,
Gregorio Marañón
, and also the ambassador of Spain, who was the first personality to shake hands with the monarch.
The emeritus king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, was present at the ceremony as a special guest of Mario Vargas Llosa.
Photo Emmanuel Dunand / AFP.
Juan Carlos I chatted very briefly with everyone,
in that first phase of the reunion with some, but it could not be said that he was eager to broaden the spectrum of dialogue.
But at that moment when Ambassador Victorio Redondo shook his hand, Don Juan Carlos took the opportunity to tell him:
"This is the first time that an ambassador from Spain has come to shake my hand",
surely alluding to recent slights that, it seems, received by Spanish diplomats in his current place of residence.
Once the ceremony was over, the crowd was divided between the Nobel and the emeritus.
Here, in this case, the hand-kissing turned into frankness and laughter, because
the emeritus was in a good mood
, he talked to everyone who wanted to approach him, he was inclined to be more informal with everyone, he was interested in what anyone was doing and allowed himself some confidences.
For example,
he revealed that he is not happy outside of Spain
, but he has it as a distant hope to return.
He was happy to participate in a cultural act of this nature
, and he made his gratitude clear when the academic who gave Vargas Llosa's laudatio recalled that it was he who gave Mario not only the marquisate but also when he was a fugitive from Fujimori. , dictator of Peru, Spanish nationality.
Vargas Llosa, who at the subsequent cocktail party hugged the king emeritus and conversed with him in the middle of a crowd in which
both protagonists
of the different dimensions of the day were confused, was happy without tears, because on occasions like this, in the past , he missed some remembering his family, especially, as happened when he made his Nobel speech, in 2010, when he remembered everything he owed to his wife (his cousin) at the time, Patricia Llosa.
Now Patricia was there with their children, seven chairs away from her ex-husband and a corridor from the emeritus.
Mario Vargas Llosa dressed in the traditional garments worn by members of the French Academy.
Photo Reuters /Sarah Meyssonnier.
Paris, at the feet of Vargas Llosa
Vargas was received with institutional and literary honors
, as if the French kingdom of letters itself was thanking him for paying attention to this country to spread his admiration as a writer in love with the literature created in this language around the world.
Who was in charge of making his praise,
Daniel Rondeau
, said that Vargas Llosa represents a unique literary figure who
has never "released the thread of his formidable novel adventures
. "
His decision to
intervene in the politics of his country,
a failed act that attracted him back to literature and, moreover, to Paris, meant a gesture of generosity.
But
“that day you agreed to take that leap, you knocked on the door of misfortune”,
as it is said in one of the most brilliant pages of one of your favorite writers, Albert Camus, in
El extranjero.
The new ephemeral immortal, the Peruvian who is also Spanish, gave his letter of battle for the literature that was celebrated there, as he gave the battle for Tirant lo Blanc decades ago, with the same passion with which he dealt with Juan Carlos Onetti or William Faulkner, in the territory and imagination that captivated him from before 1956 until now.
Mario Vargas Llosa became the first writer who does not use the French language for his texts to enter the French Academy.
Photo EFE / Teresa Suárez
A speech criticizing Vladimir Putin
Alternating his references to the French heroes of his youth and always (Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus), and after having placed Michel Serres
in the history of literature ,
the narrator he follows in the armchair that corresponds to him in the learned institution,
Vargas Llosa put on the suit of the novelist and the journalist
at the same time and explained in this paragraph the double commitment that has marked his life:
literature and democracy.
The Peruvian writer said: “The novel will save democracy or it will be buried with it and disappear.
There will always remain, of course,
that caricature that totalitarian countries pass off as novels,
but which are there, only after passing through the censorship that mutilates them, to prop up the phantasmagoric institutions of such caricatures of democracy of which
the Russia of Putin attacking the unhappy Ukraine
”.
The Peruvian Nobel Prize winner referred to the current episode of war in Europe, stressing
the courage with which Ukraine resists
, despite Russia's “military superiority”, “its atomic bombs and its massive armies”.
Mario Vargas Llosa became a member of the French Academy this Thursday, one of the oldest institutions in Paris.
Chronicler and novelist at the same time, he explained his vision of the moment the harassed country is experiencing: "As in novels,
here the weak defeat the strong
because the justice of their cause is infinitely greater than that of the latter, the supposedly powerful" .
His gratitude to Gustave Flaubert reached the tenor of an autobiography in his speech.
In a week Alfaguara publishes
A Barbarian in Paris,
the entire speech of Vargas Llosa.
It is, according to him, the most important speech of his, perhaps the most exciting and, without a doubt, the most literary because it covers all his passions, including his love for France.
look also
Mario Vargas Llosa, the fire of imagination
