2 weeks Ago By Jordi Nopca
When He won the Nobel Prize in 2010. In Catalonia, he was best remembered for his five-year stay in Barcelona and as one of the driving forces behind the Latin American boom. He settled in the city in 1970 and stayed until 1974.
During that five-year period, the Peruvian author wrote the novel (Seix Barral, 1973) and the essay (Taurus, 1975), focused on one of the authors he most admired, Gustave Flaubert. "At that time, Barcelona was the cultural capital of Spain, the place where young people from Latin America went. It was where it should be.
A cosmopolitan city where Spaniards went when they wanted to hear that they were in Europe," he explained. His relationship with the city began way back: even before his professional and friendly relationship with Carlos Barral—which began with his awarding of the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1962 for –, Vargas Llosa had debuted with another Barcelona publishing house, Roca, with (1959). In fact, at that time he spent time in Calafell, at Barral's house, where Vargas Llosa was working on his novels.
From 1969 onwards, his literary agent would be Carmen Balcells, which tied him inextricably to the Catalan capital, where he returned periodically: it was in Barcelona where he collected the Planeta Prize in 1993 for and , (Alfaguara, 2022), about Benito Pérez Galdós, accompanied by Javier Cercas. At that time, Vargas Llosa had become, for many Catalans, an uncomfortable and unpleasant public figure. The "elementary provincialism" that the Peruvian author saw in the independence process, which culminated on October 1, 2017, with the holding of the referendum that he called "illegal, anachronistic, and absurd," motivated him to become one of the most critical voices against the Politically, Vargas Llosa ended up distinguishing himself for his conservatism: he was critical of the "left-wing alternatives" in Peru, Chile, and Colombia and even pointed to the indigenous movements in his country as a "democratic danger.
" Even so, his early commitment to communism had made him sympathetic to Fidel Castro: in the 1960s, he believed that the 1959 Cuban revolution would help free Latin America "from anachronism and horror," but a decade later he was already signing an anti-Castro manifesto for having closed the anti-Castro manifesto. The writer who only resisted one genre The spectrum of Vargas Llosa's literary influences ranges from Jean-Paul Sartre to William Faulkner, from Lev Tolstoy in , from James Joyce to Francis Scott Fitzgerald. He also admired the by Joanot Martorell, to whom he dedicated a complimentary essay, (Alliance), on a date as far back as 1969.
Perhaps after his death the writer's intrinsically literary side can begin to be vindicated: for decades he distinguished himself with a healthy formal investigation, which is evident in novels such as (Seix Barral, 1966) and (Seix Barral, 1969), combined with forays into genres such as autofiction, both in (1963) as in the controversial (Seix Barral, 1977), in which he explained his relationship with a relative fourteen years older than him: Vargas Llosa married this aunt-in-law, Julia Orquidi, when he was not yet 20 years old. The writer was also an outstanding historical novelist, with examples such as (Seix Barral, 1981), in which he reconstructed, over almost 1,000 pages, a religious rebellion in Brazil at the end of the 19th century, and (Alfaguara, 2000), about the fall of dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. In addition to leaving behind some twenty novels, Vargas Llosa published a dozen essays—among them the essential (Seix Barral, 1990) – and hundreds of articles.
He also wrote plays such as (2008), which he performed alongside Aitana Sánchez-Gijón. The only genre that eluded him was poetry..
