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”!