ABOUT TIME -
Like 25 years too late???
Forgive me but this is the first time I have ever been excited about a Nobel Prize in perhaps decades, because the Prize in Literature goes to a man that I have felt deserved it every year the Literature Prize is awarded since the 1980s, after Gabriel Garcia Marquez won it in 1982. When the first Nobel Prize for the year was announced two days ago, I immediately thought, "Will this finally be Vargas Llosa's year?", not really expecting the Nobel committee to do the right thing!
I have read every book - novel, play, essays, reportage, commentary - he has published since I 'discovered' him through the seminal LA CONVERSACION EN LA CATEDRAL in 1970 (I had picked it at random while browsing the foreign-anguage bookshop in Rockefeller Center on a trip to New York) and immediately thought how amazing that Latin America had another great writer and a riveting, highly original storyteller alongside Garcia Marquez. I scoured the Spanish bookshelves in New York afterwards to get hold of anything and everything he had ever written, soon considered him my favorite contemporary all-around writer, and have watched out ever since for every new book, while singing his praises to everyone who will listen to me!...
Among his large body of work, he has written two of the funniest, LOL&ROFTL-AT-EVERY-PAGE comic novels ever written, TIA JULIA Y EL ESCRIBIDOR, in which he weaves a popular 'radionovela' soap opera with the lives of his protagonists, and PANTALEON Y LAS VISITADORAS, a hilarious satire on how the Peruvian armed forces serviced their troops in the boondocks with prostitutes, presented as a series of letters by a minor officer in charge of this 'service' in a jungle outpost. Both novels, as all his other works, are snapshots and synthesis at the same time of contemporary society, whether it is in his own Peru or elsewhere. I can think of only one contemporary novel (that I have read, that is, because I have not been too happy with much of contemporary English literature) that comes close to the two novels for truly clever humor-cum-social-commentary - John Barth's THE SOTWEED FACTOR...
Mario Vargas Llosa:
Nobel Goes for Well-Known Name
By Radhika Jones
Thursday, Oct. 07, 2010
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, poet, essayist and journalist, was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced today.
The academy honored him "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat." He is the first Latin American writer to win the prize since Octavio Paz in 1990.
[I hope the citation mentions the literary merits of his work - which are truly outstanding in terms of language, form, style and technical mastery, and his versatility in many genres. It is for their literary value that he deserves the Prize, not because he is also a great social chronicler. Best of all, he is a truly entertaining and engrossing writer, which one can say of few 'literary' giants in our day.]
The Nobel tends to be given as a lifetime achievement award — it goes to a writer, not to a particular work — and Vargas Llosa, 74, earned it with decades of critically acclaimed writing across literary genres.
Born in the small southern Peruvian town of Arequipa in 1936, he was brought up in Bolivia by his maternal grandparents after his parents divorced. He returned to Lima for military school, then studied law, and afterward he lived abroad for nearly two decades, spending time in Spain, France and England.
It was during that time that he began writing novels. His 1963 novel, The Time of the Hero, which drew on his military school experiences and exposed the corruption he encountered there, catapulted him onto the literary scene.
Among his other well-known novels are The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral and the epic saga The War at the End of the World, a fable of Latin American revolution set in the Brazilian town of Canudos, which the influential American literary critic Harold Bloom cites in his list of the essential works of the Western canon.
[Indeed, LA GUERRA DEL FIN DEL MUNDO is one of a kind (it is populated by dozens of characters, major and minor, who are all unforgettable) - the best of Vargas Llosa's historical fiction, which includes the later LA FIESTA DEL CHIVO on the Trujillo reign of terror in the Dominican Republic told dramatically through the story of one family]. The many ways in which he describes how torture is carried out, entirely through indirect means, is masterful and far more chilling than if he had described the tortures directly.
Interviewed by The Paris Review in 1990, Vargas Llosa ascribed his "obsessive desire to write" to his time at military school. "It was an extremely traumatic experience which in many ways marked the end of my childhood," he said, "the rediscovery of my country as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition and caught up in sometimes ferocious battle. I suppose the experience had an influence on me; one thing I’m sure of is that it gave rise to the great need in me to create, to invent."
Like many other prominent Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa coupled his urge to invent with an urge to record and comment. He has had a prolific career as a journalist, essayist and critic; among his notable critical works is a study of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
And like many writers in the Latin American tradition, he has been politically active, moving over the decades from the left (he supported Fidel Castro) to a more conservative position. His autobiographical A Fish in the Water chronicles his unsuccessful run for president of Peru in 1990.
In his fiction, Vargas Llosa is a storyteller in the 19th-century mode, one who seeks to "abolish the distance between the story and the reader."
He told The Paris Review: "I think it’s very important that the intellectual element, whose presence is inevitable in a novel, dissolves into the action, into the stories that must seduce the reader not by their ideas but by their color, by the emotions they inspire, by their element of surprise, and by all the suspense and mystery they’re capable of generating."
Vargas Llosa has a high international profile; he is widely read in translation, has served as president of the PEN international association of writers, and in 1995 was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest literary honor in the Spanish-speaking world.
In winning the Nobel, he joins an elite group of Latin American writers: Paz, Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda. He has taught and lectured around the world; this fall he is in residence at Princeton University, where he was notified of his win.
"I am very grateful to have received this privilege," Vargas Llosa told CNN en Espanol Thursday morning. "The truth is I did not expect it. It was a surprise ... but a pleasant surprise."
It was a pleasant surprise for many armchair Nobel enthusiasts as well, after two years of dark-horse candidates. There is no publicized short list for the prize and nominations are kept secret for 50 years, so literary critics and journalists worldwide are reduced to an annual October ritual of frenzied speculation.
The night before the announcement, British betting house Ladbrokes had the American novelist Cormac McCarthy on top, with odds of 3/1, followed by Japan's Haruki Murakami (5/1) and Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o (11/2); Vargas Llosa was at 25/1.
Earlier this week, handicapping half a dozen Latin American authors' chances for victory, the blog The Millions counted Vargas Llosa's name recognition as a possible strike against him. Now, of course, he's as recognized as a writer can be.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/10/2010 18:42]