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Euronews
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
'The world of literature is mourning': How Mario Vargas Llosa brought Spanish to splendour
ADVERTISEMENT Peru has been holding a day of mourning along with the world of literature to honour Mario Vargas Llosa. The celebrated Peruvian writer, and Nobel Laureate in Literature, has died at the age of 89 in Lima , leaving a huge void in the world of letters. His death has shocked readers, writers and world leaders, who have expressed their grief at the loss of one of the most influential voices of the 20th century. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described him as "a master of words". In a message on the social network X, he expressed his gratitude "as a reader for an immense work, for so many key books to understand our times". "On behalf of the Government of Spain, I send my condolences to the family, friends and the great community of readers around the world", Pedro Sánchez continued. The Royal Household has sent condolences to his family via social media. Vargas Llosa received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature from the hands of the now King Felipe VI in 1986. Author of works such as "The City and the Dogs" and "The Feast of the Goat", he not only left his mark on Latin American literature, but also became a global icon. In a statement from Peru, his native country, the government mourned "the death of Mario Vargas Llosa, universal writer and distinguished winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His intellectual genius and his vast oeuvre will remain an enduring legacy for future generations". On the streets of Madrid, the city that welcomed the writer in his last years, the sadness of his fans was widely reflected. "I loved Vargas Llosa, he had a great impact on me. "The Feast of the goat" (La fiesta del chivo) left its mark on me, but also "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" (La tía Julia y el escribidor), a marvellous novel," one reader told Euronews. Another admirer of the writer highlighted his human qualities: "Beyond his books, I liked him as a person". Mario Vargas Llosa at a book signing Copyright 2010 AP. All rights reserved. Speaking to Euronews, the former director of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (RAE), Darío Villanueva, of which Vargas Llosa was an academician, said that he was "a universal writer, very cosmopolitan, faithful to his Peruvian roots but also to Spain". His ability to weave complex stories with an accessible style made him a favourite with the public. Villanueva, who had been very close to the author for years, underlined his relevance: "His prose was aesthetically demanding, but always accessible. He managed to merge cultured and popular literature, leading readers to enjoy his extraordinary narrative". Vargas Llosa's impact transcends borders. His work, influenced by his life in Paris, London and Madrid, integrated the European literary tradition with his Latin American roots. Novels such as 'Conversation in the Cathedral' and 'The Green House' reflect this fusion, which revitalised Spanish-language fiction. "His success with 'The City and the Dogs' in 1963 was a revulsive for the Spanish novel, which was at a dead end," explained Villanueva. This impulse extended to the Latin American 'boom', where Vargas Llosa, along with names such as Gabriel García Márquez , reoriented Hispanic literature towards an overflowing imagination and a seductive style. His commitment to form and history made him an inescapable point of reference. Literary critic and member of the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) Beyond his novels, Vargas Llosa was a literary critic, journalist and essayist of enormous relevance. His columns in 'El País', published in its 'Touchstone' (Piedra de toque) section, offered sharp reflections on reality. "Mario was a great critic and literary theorist, but also a friend of enormous sympathy, sincere and courteous," recalled Villanueva, visibly affected. His time at the RAE, where he was an active participant, left an indelible mark. "He gave splendour to the Academy with his ability to assume the variants of Spanish and his authority as a writer," says Villanueva. His acceptance speech, dedicated to the Spanish novelist Azorín, and his admiration for authors such as Flaubert and Faulkner, show his connection to world literature. Mario Vargas Llosa's legacy will live on in every page he wrote and in the memory of those who will continue to read him. As Villanueva says,"his void is impossible to fill". Today, the world bids farewell to the eternal 'scribe', but his stories will live on.
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We waited greedily for his novels': Mario Vargas Llosa, a revolutionary of Spanish-language fiction
The early 1960s was, for my generation in Argentina, an age of discovery when, in our mid-teens, we learned about sex, metaphysics, the Beatles, Ezra Pound, Che Guevara, Fellini's films, and the new literature of Latin America. In the bookstore around the corner from my school, there began to appear novels with black-and-white photographs on the dust jackets whose Spanish-language authors, while acknowledging Borges as the fons et origo of all literary endeavours, attempted to find in the 19th-century European realists new ways to depict the troubled reality of Spain and South America. One of those novels was La Ciudad y los Perros (The City and the Dogs, oddly translated into English as The Time of the Hero) by a young, unknown Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who, in 1962, had won the recently created Premio Biblioteca Breve in Spain. Our literature teacher, while encouraging us to explore the transgressive fields of surrealism and fantastic fiction, thought that this novel was too extreme for adolescent imaginations: too much youthful violence; too much murky sex; too much questioning of authority. There had been nothing like it in Spanish-language fiction before. A fierce indictment of Peru's military system, incandescent with rage against the hypocrisy of the established order as mirrored in Lima's most prestigious military academy (which the author had attended), it was also the chronicle of an adolescent rite of passage into the ranks of the commanding patriarchy. The book so incensed the Peruvian authorities that, in the tradition of the city's founding fathers, an auto-da-fé was ordered and dozens of copies were burned in the academy's courtyard. At the very start of what was labelled by canny publishers as the 'boom' of Latin-American literature, Vargas Llosa's book was recognised as a modern subversive classic. Until then, the so-called 'novel of protest' in the literatures of Latin America had Zola as its model. Under the large shadow of the author of La Terre and Germinal, writers such as Ciro Alegría and José María Arguedas had written about the lives of those whom our European culture had taught us to deny. Vargas Llosa didn't follow Zola but rather chose Flaubert as his guide, writing a decade later a splendid essay, The Perpetual Orgy, in which he argued that Madame Bovary kickstarted the modern novel by establishing an 'objective' narrator who, because they refused to preach, gave the illusion of telling a story that was true. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion We waited with greedy expectation for Vargas Llosa's next novels, The Green House (1966) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), and later Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and the erotically humorous Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), all the time trying to discover who this man was who, in public life, swayed his political alliances from left to right, all the time remaining committed, in his fiction, to basic precepts of human empathy. The young Vargas Llosa, like so many South-American intellectuals, had supported Castro's revolution, but after the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla he declared himself an opposer to the Cuban regime. Almost two decades later, Vargas Llosa became the head of the centre-right party Movimiento Libertad, and entered into a coalition with two other centre-right politicians. In 1990, as candidate to the presidency, Vargas Llosa lost to Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights abuses, and later still, unlawfully pardoned. From then on, Vargas Llosa restricted his political activism to his frequent newspaper columns and, much more subtly and effectively, to his fiction, for which he was awarded, in 2010, the Nobel prize.
