Nobel per la Letteratura a Vargas Llosa

Il premio Nobel per la letteratura è stato assegnato oggi a Mario Vargas Llosa, scrittore peruviano nato nel 1934 e diventato tra i grandi della letteratura del continente sudamericano. La motivazione della giuria che assegna quello che è ancora, volente o nolente, il premio più importante per la carriera di uno scrittore è stata "per la sua cartografia delle strutture del potere e le sue immagini incisive di resistenza, rivolta e sconfitta dell'individuo". Come non pensare, leggendo questa frase al suo romanzo più famoso e più riuscito, "La Festa del Caprone", storia dell'ascesa e della caduta un dittatore. Su questo blog ho parlato di due romanzi di questo scrittore, "La Zia Julia e lo scribacchino" e, appunto, "La Festa del Caprone". Ho anche letto, anni fa, "Il Paradiso è altrove" e "I cuccioli". Più avanti, se avrò tempo e voglia, magari vi parlo del primo, che è un romanzo forse "secondario" di Vargas Llosa, ma che a me è piaciuto molto perché parla della vita del pittore Gauguin.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded today to Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer born in 1934 who has become one of the greatest in his continent. The motivationof of the jury for this prize, which is still the most important in a writer's career, was "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistence, revolt and defeat". After reading this sentence it is impossible not to think of his most famous and well-crafted novel, "The Feast of the Goat" (La Fiesta del Chivo), history of the rise and fall of a dictator. On this blog I have written of two of his novels, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" (La Tià Julia y el Escribidor) and the aforementioned "The Feast of the Goat" (La Fiesta del Chivo). I have also read, years ago, "The Way to Paradise" ("El Paraiso en la Otra Esquina") and "Los Cachorros". Maybe I will write about the former, which is a less famous work by Vargas Llosa but one that I liked, because it relates the life of Paul Gauguin, the painter.

31. “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” by Mario Vargas Llosa

Year of first publication: 1977
Genre: novel, satirical novel, comic novel
Country: Peru

In italiano: La Zia Julia e lo Scribacchino di Mario Vargas Llosa, edito da Einaudi ET (1994), €11,50
En español: La Tía Julia y el Escribidor de Mario Vargas Llosa

Plot: Lima, 1950s. Pedro Camacho is a Bolivian-born, eccentric writer of radio soap-operas that have a tremendous success all over the country. The story of Pedro Camacho, told through his scripts, is intertwined with that of Mario, a student and a wannabe writer who works as a news bulletin editor for Radio Panamericana and falls in love with the divorced wife of a cousin, his Aunt Julia, thirteen years his senior.

Some thoughts: This is the third novel by Vargas Llosa that I read after The Way to Paradise (El Paraíso en la Otra Esquina in Spanish) and The Feast of the Goat (La Fiesta del Chivo in Spanish, read this post) and I was not disappointed. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is actually one of Vargas Llosa’s most popular novels and it is partly autobiographical, seen that Vargas Llosa also married one of his in-laws who was thirteen years his senior. This book was written some twenty years after Vargas Llosa’s first marriage, when the couple was already divorced. In fact, Julia Urquidi Illanes, the real Aunt Julia, published a novel called Lo que Varguitas no Dijo (What Varguitas didn’t say), telling her version of the love story. Half autobiographical account and half work of fiction, La Tía Julia is a very engaging and enjoyable novel. The author used raw material from his life in Lima in the 1950s as well as much imagination in order to give shape to the funniest character of the novel, Pedro Camacho. Almost a dwarf, obsessively dedicated to his job and with a profound and exaggerated hatred for Argentinians, Pedro Camacho writes radio serials full of clichés, but the ability of Vargas Llosa makes them as captivating as the rest of the novel. There’s a clash between the epic, tragic and surreal stories written by Pedro Camacho and what Mario attempts to do with his realistic fiction. Vargas Llosa certainly intends to make fun of the clichés of soap-operas and cheap literature, for example through Pedro Camacho’s confused and entangled plots, but he also pays homage to the act of writing, detailing the way in which the two writers, Pedro and Mario, write their stories (the former writes 10-12 hours per day without stopping, whereas the latter is never satisfied of his work and throws away every single story that he writes). They are both writers, though very different, and success comes to them at different times. Whether “the truly good writer”, if such a thing exists, is more like Pedro or Mario is left to the reader to judge.
Vargas Llosa’s usual device, that is to say telling two different stories in alternating chapters, works perfectly for this novel. Every second chapter is a story written by Camacho, thus it is completely independent from the narrative of the other chapters. What is amazing is that Vargas Llosa is able to give life to a character, Pedro Camacho, almost entirely through the stories that he writes.
Comical and satirical, but never gross nor boring, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter really was a joy to read. By the way, not many people know that the novel was made into a Hollywood feature film called Tune In Tomorrow (1990) starring Peter Falk as Pedro Camacho and Keanu Reeves as Mario.

About the author: see this post

If you want to know more about this book, listen to the podcast from BBC's World Book Club.

By the way, The Guardian celebrates another great Latin American writer and one that I love, Julio Cortázar, in this article from a series on short story writers.

26. “La Fiesta del Chivo” by Mario Vargas Llosa

In English: The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
In italiano: La Festa del Caprone di Mario Vargas Llosa, pubblicato da Einaudi (2000), € 18,59

Year of first publication: 2000
Genre: historical novel, dictator novel
Country: Author from Peru, novel set in the Dominican Republic

About the author: Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, into a middle-class family. He spent part of his childhood in Bolivia with his maternal grandfather, who was a consul for Peru there. He returned to Lima, where he studied law and literature. He started working for some Peruvian newspapers and married his uncle’s sister-in-law, 13 years his senior. He spent a few years in Europe where he began to write prolifically. His first novel was La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1963), a success of critic and public. His second novel, La Casa Verde (The Green House, 1965) made him one of the leading figures of the Latin American Boom. Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) is one of his most ambitious and famous novels to date. More novels came in the following years: La Tía Julia y el Escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977), La Guerra del Fin del Mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1981) and La Fiesta del Chivo (2000). He is considered one of the most prominent Latin American writers, together with Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luís Borges and Carlos Fuentes. He is also a politician and has run for presidency in 1990.

Plot: Urania Cabral returns to her hometown, Santo Domingo, after 35 years. The city and the country are now very different: the regime of Generalísimo Rafael Trujillo has been defeated and democracy restored. Urania, now a successful lawyer in New York, is not simply another of the many Dominicans who suffered from Trujillo’s cruel dictatorship: she is in fact the daughter of Trujillo’s disgraced secretary of state Agustín “Cerebrito” Cabral. Another strand in the novel dates back to May 1961, when a group of assassins are waiting to gun down the evil dictator. All of them are very close to Trujillo but have their reasons to assassinate him. Finally, the third strand is the portrait of the Generalísimo himself and of his last days: he is charismatic, egocentric and intimidating man, but he is also cruel, violent and a chauvinist.

Some thoughts:
* It contains spoilers*

At the beginning of the book, the chapters that I liked the most were those concerning Urania: why did she leave Santo Domingo so suddenly and why did she refuse to return to her country ever since? Why is she so mad at her father after 35 years? Why is she unable to have a proper relationship with a man? The first chapters concerning the assassins who are were waiting to gun down Trujilo were not as “page-turning”, maybe because I already knew that they were going to make it and kill the evil dictator. As the novel progressed, however, I became interested in the lives and motivations of the killers and I became fond of all the characters. Still, the third strand, detailing the last days of El Jefe, was the most enthralling: entering the mind and the house of a dictator is certainly fascinating. Having read three novels by Vargas Llosa so far (this one, El Paraíso en la Otra Esquina and La Tía Julia y el Escribidor), I can say with some certainty that dividing the book in different strands of narration, alternating the chapters dedicated to each of them, is a way that Vargas Llosa uses quite often to interweave different stories that are nonetheless all connected in some way.

La Fiesta del Chivo is part of a tradition of Latin American novels about dictators. One of the most famous is, for example, El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) by García Márquez, which unfortunately I haven’t read. Some “dictator novels” I have read are: El general en su laberinto, also by García Márquez, about Bolivar’s last days (even if he’s not usually considered a dictator, he was a great leader with some authoritarian power); A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif, recounting a series of speculations on the plane crash of Pakistan’s General Zia (read my review, in English/Italian), and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (also partly set in part in Santo Domingo during the dictatorship of Trujillo, read my review in English). The latter, so different from La Fiesta del Chivo in some parts and so similar in others, was described by Michiko Kakutani from The New York Times, as : “So original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West”!

In both La Fiesta del Chivo and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao I found the same way of speaking about Trujillo: with rage, hatred and humour. There’s no magical realism in Vargas Llosa, though (there’s no trace of fukú, the Dominican curse), as his novel is often described as “realist”.
At the beginning of the book, there is a passage about the chauvinism of Dominican men that becomes quite important if you think of the ultimate meaning of Urania’s story (Santo Domingo has been politically and physically violated by Trujillo):

“A ratos, de algún vehículo asoma una cabeza masculina y un instante los suyos se encuentran con unos ojos varoniles que le miran los pechos, las piernas o el trasero. Esas miradas. Está esperando un hueco que le permita cruzar y una vez más se dice, como ayer, como anteayer, que está en tierra dominicana. En New York ya nadie mira a las mujeres con ese desparpajo. Midiéndola, sopesándola, calculando cuánta carne hay en cada una de sus tetas y muslos, cuántos vellos en su pubis y la cuerva exacta de sus nalgas. Cierra los ojos, presa de un ligero vahído. En New York, ya ni los latinos, dominicanos, colombianos, guatemaltecos, miran así. Han aprendido a reprimirse, entendido que no deben mirar a las mujeres como miran los perros a las perras, los caballos a las yeguas, los puercos a las puercas”.

Urania's story is important because it represents the way in which the dictator ruined his country and his people, violating them and changing them forever. Quoting Junot Díaz again: this book is perfect if at school you “missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history”!

15. “Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon” by Jorge Amado

Genre: novel
Year of first publication: 1958
Country: Brazil

In italiano: “Gabriella Garofano e Cannella” di Jorge Amado, edito da Einaudi nella collana Super ET (1989,1991) € 13

On the author: Jorge Amado was born in 1912 in Itabuna, in a region of Brazil called Bahia. He spent his childhood in the coastal town of Ilhéus and went to high school in the capital of the region, Salvador de Bahia. He started to write in literary magazines and published his first novel, O País do Carnaval, when he was 18 and his second novel Cacau came out straight after that. He had some problems because of his leftist activities and his novels where banned in Portugal, whereas he gained popularity in the rest of Europe. Because he was a communist, he went into exile twice, first in Argentina and then in Europe. He went back to Brazil in 1955 and abandoned his political activity. He wrote Gabriela, Cravo e Canela in 1958 and Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos in 1966. His work deals with the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia and with the life in the areas of the cocoa trade. He is the best-known Brazilian modernist writer and possibly one of the most famous Brazilian writers ever.

Plot: The book tells two separate but related tales: first, the romance between Nacib Saad, a respectable bar owner of Syrian origin, and Gabriela, an innocent and captivating migrant worker from the impoverished interior, and second, the political struggle between the old guard of landed Cacao growers, led by the Bastos clan, and the forces of modernization, in the person of Mundinho Falcao, a wealthy young man from São Paulo. It can be read simultaneously as an unusual, charming love story, a description of the political and social forces at work in 1920s Brazil, a somewhat satirical depiction of Latin American aspirations to "modernity," and a celebration of the local culture and pleasures of Bahia.

Some thoughts: It is strange to think that this novel was first published in 1958: ten years before Cien años de soledad by García Márquez and more than twenty years before La casa de los espíritus by Isabel Allende. There are so many things that remind me of those writers: first of all Nacib, a Brazilian of Arabian origin, bears echos of a character in Allende’s Eva Luna: Riad Halabi. Of course Riad is profoundly different from Nacib, Riad being a Turkish middle-aged man with a cleft palate and Nacib a young Brazilian of Syrian descent, but they’re both from a part of the world which evokes tales of love, jealousy and lust – three things that feature in the two novels. In spite of this, the “lusty character” is sensual Gabriela, not the Arab Nacib. Another thing that reminds me of Allende’s novels are the smells, the colours and the exotic landscape of the novel. Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon also reminds me of García Márquez for its many characters (too many in my opinion!) and the importance of politics, especially the opposition between conservative and progressive people, between the fazendeiros and those who are merely newcomers to the town. I must say that all the politics in the book didn’t interest me that much: I was eager to read the pages concerning the love between Gabriela and Nacib. In fact, it was hard to follow the story of Mundinho Falcao and how Ilheus ended up being a modern town. Gabriela is only one of the many people who live in Ilhéus and not the most important characters in the novel (she comes in at page 100 I think), but she’s the real strength of the novel, so I think that she should have had more space!
What emerges from this novel is the conflict between tradition and innovations, the struggles of a small coastal town to become a better place to live in, and the conflict between the bourgeoisie of Ilhéus, white and elegant but a bit uptight, and the freer nature of Gabriela, who comes from the sertão, a mostly desert area further inland. She is a very poor mulatto woman who arrives in Ilhéus all dirty and barefooted and is looking for a job. She doesn’t even know what her surname is or how old she is, but she can cook and make love like no other woman in town. She sings and dances while she is doing the housework and this is one of the reasons why Nacib falls desperately in love with her. She is a free spirit, nonetheless. Even though she loves Nacib more than any other man in her life, she is unable to be faithful to him: she is not suited to be a gentleman’s wife and even appreciates the attentions of other men. Nacib is of course very jealous of Gabriela’s success with other men and this will lead to some problems in their relationship.
I can imagine that Amado’s depiction of sex life in his town, Ilhéus, must have caused scandal among his people. I just discovered that the book was made into a movie starring Marcello Mastroianni as Nacib!
This writer has very good potential, especially regarding tales of desperate love and social inequalities in the land of cocoa trade, but I want to read at least Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands before giving a clear-cut judgement on his style and his skills as a storyteller.

Mario Benedetti (1920 - 2009)

Mario Benedetti (1920 - 2009) was a Uruguayan journalist, novelist and poet. From 1973 to 1985, when a dictatorship ruled his country, he lived abroad. He often wrote about exile and the dictatorships of Latin America. Wikipedia says that he was not well-known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he was considered oen of Latin America's most important 20th-century wirters. He passed away on the 17th May in Montevideo.

I bought one of his books (Andamios) during a trip to Spain. I had heard of him during Spanish classes but I had read only a couple of his poems. I was attracted by the fact that he bears my grandmother's maiden surname (his father is of Italian origin like many other Uruguayans). I really liked the book, funny in some points and very painful in other parts. This is one of his poems on dictatorship:

HOMBRE PRESO QUE MIRA A SU HIJO

al "viejo" hache

Cuando era como vos me enseñaron los viejos
y también las maestras bondadosas y miopes
que libertad o muerte era una redundancia
a quién se le ocurría en un país
donde los presidentes andaban sin capangas
que la patria o la tumba era otro pleonasmo
ya que la patria funcionaba bien
en las canchas y en los pastoreos

realmente botija no sabian un corno
pobrecitos creían que libertad
era tan sólo una palabra aguda
que muerte era tan sólo grave o llana
y cárceles por suerte una palabra esdrújula

olvidaban poner el acento en el hombre

la culpa no era exactamente de ellos
sino de otros más duros y siniestros
y éstos sí
cómo nos ensartaron
con la limpia república verbal
cómo idealizaron
la vidurria de vacas y estancieros

y cómo nos vendieron un ejército
que tomaba su mate en los cuarteles

uno no siempre hace lo que quiere
uno no siempre puede
por eso estoy aquí
mirándote y echándote
de menos

por eso es que no puedo despeinarte el jopo
ni ayudarte con la tabla del nueve
ni acribillarte a pelotazos

vos sabés que tuve que elegir otros juegos
y que los jugué en serio

y jugué por ejemplo a los ladrones
y los ladrones eran policías

y jugué por ejemplo a la escondida
y si te descubrían te mataban
y jugué a la mancha
y era de sangre

botija aunque tengas pocos años
creo que hay que decirte la verdad
para que no la olvides

por eso no te oculto que me dieron picana
que casi me revientan los riñones

todas estas llagas hinchazones y heridas
que tus ojos redondos miran hipnotizados
son durísimos golpes
son botas en la cara
demasiado dolor para que te lo oculte
demasiado suplicio para que se me borre

pero también es bueno que conozcas
que tu viejo calló
o puteó como un loco
que es una linda forma de callar

que tu viejo olvidó todos los números
(por eso no podría ayudarte en las tablas)
y por lo tanto todos los teléfonos

y las calles y el color de los ojos
y los cabellos y las cicatrices
y en qué esquina
en qué bar
qué parada
qué casa

y acordarse de vos
de tu carita
lo ayudaba a callar
una cosa es morirse de dolor
y otra cosas morirse de verguenza

por eso ahora
me podés preguntar
y sobre todo
puedo yo responder

uno no siempre hace lo que quiere
pero tiene el derecho de no hacer
lo que no quiere

llorá nomás botija
son macanas
que los hombres no lloran
aquí lloramos todos

gritamos berreamos moqueamos chillamos
maldecimos
porque es mejor llorar que traicionar
porque es mejor llorar que traicionarsel

lorá
pero no olvides