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Vargas Llosa: the fish swims again in the waters of the Seine

2023-02-11T12:57:26.317Z


Paris, the capital of literature that he dreamed of as a boy and continues to dream of, opened the doors of the main literary institution in the country.


More than half a century ago, in 1956, a boy who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature arrived in Paris.

He was the only son of an unnatural father who was urged by his mother to leave for dead.

He grew up believing himself dead, and so he prayed at night so that the blessed God would make that man not suffer in heaven.

That boy who came to Paris to be cured of the horror of having recovered his father (he was not dead: he reappeared in the boy's early adolescence) had become an aspirant to be like Gustave Flaubert, a great inventor of stories from reality.

The idea was not only to imitate or supplant the great French writer of the 19th century, but to make each story that happened to him, as happened to the author of Madame Bovary, an interpretation of what happened in his house, in his neighborhood, or in the world.

He was going to be a novelist, he already was, really.

Soon this boy, who had gone with flowers to the grave of his French idol to mark his vocation and also his ambition for the future, became a literary author capable of telling the stories he lived through in his childhood and youth.

Generous with others (with his Peruvian teachers, with his greatest French reference), he read everything within his reach, worked as a journalist, became essential in Peruvian newspapers, and in the end it was, much more than a vocation, a reality. .

This Thursday that boy, this man, now an adult who will enter the year 87 on March 28, found in Paris the ratification of his French vocation.

Well, in the capital of literature, which he dreamed of as a boy and which he continues to dream of, opened the doors of the main literary institution in the country of Flaubert, Victor Hugo and other great heroes of the past who continue to set his pace. this veteran writer who sometimes cries like a child, even cried (speaking of Patricia, his wife at the time) when he evoked her as the one who resolved his life.

Mario Vargas Llosa, together with the writers Pascal Ory and Daniel Rondeau, at the ceremony of incorporation of the Peruvian novelist to the French Academy, in Paris, on February 9, 2023. Photo: Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP.

This little boy, now an adult with white hair and hands marked by time, a protagonist in his country not only as a writer of the affairs that have happened there but because once (in 1990) he wanted to be president of the nation, he has received in France , its most transparent place, the Academie Française's homage to its literature, to its devotion to Flaubert and to the certain fact that it never abandoned its passion for the wise syntax that it learned here from the literary music of the authors of this language.

The boy, now a veteran, is still called Mario, he was Marito, he was also Zavalita, and he is Mario Vargas Llosa for the world.

His entry into a place of honor in the French academic party is a major news in his life.

He received this kind of accolade, a huge French cultural distinction, as if he was being resurrected as a Frenchman.

The former King of Spain, Don Juan Carlos de Borbón, who named him a Marquis and who helped Felipe González make him a Spanish citizen when he was dispossessed of his Peruvian credentials by Fujimori, wanted to be at the ceremony and that turned the cultural event into a political moment of which you must already have news because Clarín was there.

This award, being a French academic coming from Arequipa and Piura, and having written books that mostly talk about Brazil, Peru or other places in Latin America, means having deeply touched the hearts of Flaubert's descendants.

Indeed, from the beginning of his time, Flaubert was the reference point for the music of his syntax, and that part of his biography has never been an element of the past or forgotten, which is still present, as is his passion for literature. that he considers the bravest of literatures, the one that has marked his life, the one that keeps him alive culturally and emotionally, as an intellectual, as a writer, as a citizen.

In the act of this enthronement in the culture that he admired since before he was twenty years old, I was looking at him as if I were reading among his words some of the most important personal letters of his life, imposed as a way of daring and crying.

From that difficult childhood in which the departed father decided to be present, to his successive trips to meet the world, perhaps to forget, surely to dream stories that would change the ones that came before.

The book in which Vargas Llosa includes all those episodes that made him a man, and a writer, was El pez en el agua, whose first cover (1993) appears triumphant when in reality that volume (538 pages) also constitutes, in addition of the explanation of his adolescent ambitions, in the story of a Peruvian defeat.

He called me from Argentina, that year that book came out, when he had already digested that Peruvian defeat, a story that he had already told and as if he had overcome it, wondering if he could speak, when he returned to Spain, with the editor of a firm, Alfaguara, whose He had seen books scattered throughout all the bookstores in the Southern Cone, while there was no trace of his book.

The person who received the call (which was myself, excuse me, then in charge of that firm) could not explain to him what was happening with his readers in Argentina, for example, but that we could talk, of course.

We talked standing up, at the Palace hotel in Madrid, and there he explained to me again what happened in his unsuccessful experience with the bookstores in Buenos Aires, and he told me that perhaps he could publish in that publishing house that he kept having in the limelight the books that were coming out of their plates.

He said this: "I want to marry Alfaguara."

People more skilful than this chronicler soon published it, and it is seen to be very successful everywhere, to the point that for the first time in the history of the Spanish-American publishing world another book of his, La Fiesta del Chivo, was sold in equal quantities. in America and Spain.

A best seller, as they say.

I read that book, El pez en el agua, and I understood Vargas Llosa, the child, the adolescent, the adult, and always the child, because in that singular book, as if drawn from the soul, writing like someone who vomits words to understand old silences , and I have always proposed it to those, such as those who did not read it in 1993 because they did not consider that it was already a son of the Revolution, who feel reluctant to understand the power of its prose and, also, the rabidly literary commitment that led, for example, and it is not by chance, to the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Now I have seen him in Paris, with all his family, the children and his ex-wife Patricia, who is his cousin, and who came to the City of Light after eight years of marital separation to fulfill the wishes of his children, and of the father of these, of being together in this episode that is also a celebration of years of struggle for literature that continues to be their way of life.

I have heard him give his entrance speech in that demanding academic world, I have seen him with his papers on the lectern, spelling out in his flawless French names from the world of his youth and maturity, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre... , and above all Gustave Flaubert, and I have felt that Marito, the author of Conversation in the Cathedral, Los Cachorros or, for example, La Fiesta del Chivo, fell in life to be a writer and to be immortal, a category in the that the French have made him enter and that it is also up to him because all his life, since he discovered that his father was a threat, he has searched in literature, in tears or in the fire of literature, for the only truth of the lies

I left the event, next to the Seine, feeling that the cold of Paris had for once been usurped by the warm dark prairie of the Lima nights through which he ran crying when he discovered that his father had not died and that, furthermore, it was going to make his life miserable.

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-02-11

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