The second volume of the journalistic texts of Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘The country of a thousand faces. Writings about Peru’which he dedicates to the history, politics, social reality and culture of his native country, is published this Thursday the 27th, according to the Alfaguara publishing house.
This work by Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize in Literature 2010is added to the volume published in 2021 with the title ‘The fire of the imagination. Books, stages, screens and museums’which brought together his articles on all areas of culture, and especially literary criticism.
«Peru is for me a kind of incurable disease and my relationship with it is intense, harsh, full of the violence that characterizes passion»assures the author born in Arequipa, Peru) in 1936, who also has Spanish nationality.
The more than six decades of journalistic work by Mario Vargas Llosa are punctuated by texts on the culture, politics, history and social reality of Peru that are brought together in this volume whose editing has been carried out by the writer. Carlos Granes.
«This is the Peru of Mario Vargas Llosa, the one he traveled, lived and saw evolve socially, culturally and politically. The country in which he was inspired to write his novels, the one that incubated his literary demons and the one that awakened his nonconformity and intellectual curiosity. This is the Peru in which he projected his illusions and with which he engaged in more than one skirmish; the society that he wanted to transform through political action and that he ultimately helped shape through public debate »highlights Granés in the prologue.
The prologue writer considers that if as a novelist Vargas Llosa “managed to establish an image of Peru that is today recognized worldwide – a fictitious, mythical image, which nevertheless faithfully summarizes the conflicts, dilemmas, frustrations and desires of Peruvian life -, as intellectual managed to infect society with his concerns, ideas, tastes and values.
During a tribute he received last year at the Cervantes Institute of Madridin which the first part of his journalistic texts was presented, the author of ‘The city and the Dogs’ either ‘The party of the goat’, explained how he started writing at a very young age, in a newspaper when he was still in school. EFE (YO)
