The second volume of the journalistic texts of Mario Vargas Llosa, The country of a thousand faces. Writings about Peruwhich the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner dedicates to the history, politics, social reality and culture of his native country, was published this Thursday the 27th and joins the volume that came out in 2021 with the title The fire of imagination. Books, stages, screens and museumswhich 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 him is intense, harsh, full of the violence that characterizes passion,” says the author, born in Arequipa (Peru) in 1936, who also has Spanish nationality.
The more than six decades of journalistic work of Mario Vargas Llosa They are punctuated with texts on the culture, politics, history and social reality of Peru that this volume brings together, the editing of which has been carried out by the writer Carlos Granes.
“This is Peru by Mario Vargas Llosa, the one who traveled, lived and saw it evolve socially, culturally and politically. The country in which she was inspired to write his novels, the one that incubated her literary demons and the one that awakened his nonconformity and his intellectual curiosity. This is the Peru in which he projected his delusions and with whom he engaged in more than one skirmish; the society that wanted to transform from political action and which ultimately helped to shape from public debate,” Granés highlights in the prologue.
And he goes on: “It is impossible to analyze the work of Vargas Llosa without talking about Peru and it is impossible to analyze Peru in the last fifty or sixty years without talking about Vargas Llosa”.
The prologue writer considers that yes, as a novelist Vargas Llosa “He 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 an intellectual he managed to infect society with his concerns. , ideas, tastes and values.”
[Los libros de Mario Vargas Llosa se pueden adquirir, en formato digital, en Bajalibros, clickeando acá.]
During a tribute he received last year at the Cervances Institute in Madrid, in which the first part of his journalistic texts was presented, the author of The city and the Dogs either The party of the goatexplained how he started writing at a very young age, in a newspaper when he was still in school.
Granés details: “The prehistory of Vargas Llosa His career as a journalist dates back to 1952, when he was barely fifteen years old and joined the editorial staff of La Crónica in Lima, and then that of La Industria in Piura, where he wrote his first articles on Peruvian literature. Six years later he was about to finish his degree in Literature, actively participating in Lima’s cultural life and writing the stories and essays that inaugurated his career as a writer.
These years would be fundamental. Granés says: “They were waiting for him around the corner The city and the Dogsthe Latin American Boom and the cultural movement that emerged after the RCuban evolution, achievements harvested in the sixties that nevertheless owed much to the aesthetic disputes that Vargas Llosa had emerged as a precocious member of the generation of the fifties.”
Source: EFE and Infobae Editorial Team
