Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel gives literature 2010
Peruvian-Spanish novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, died this Sunday at the age of 89 at his home in Lima, Peru, where he lived since 2022.
Born in Arequipa, on March 28, 1936, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosawho won the prize Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010was also a politician, journalist, essayist and university professor.
Vargas Llosa is one of the most important names of Latin American letters And he established himself as one of the main writers of his generation, to the point that some critics consider that he had an impact and an international audience like no other of the ‘boom‘from Latin America.
But it was not just for the literature that became known. Early on began to get involved politically, first as supporter of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, then as a defender of the most conservative, capitalist liberal democracy, even running for the presidency of his country in 1990 by a center-right coalition, against Alberto Fujimori.
A politics is a constant theme in your workwhich presents itself almost as a manifesto of social criticism of social and racial hierarchies.
In Nobel’s acceptance discourse, Mario Vargas Llosa recognized that it is difficult for a Latin American writer to avoid politics, because the problems are wider than that, they are social, civic and moral, which is why “Latin American literature is impregnated with political concerns” which, in many cases, are more moral concerns, “said the Peruvian author.
“I am basically a writer and I would like to be remembered – if I remembered – for my writing and my work. (…) When I write literature, I think political ideas are secondary. I think I think Literature comprises a wider horizon of human experience”He said.
The Nobel Prize jury justified Vargas Llosa’s choice for being the holder of a writing that makes the “cartography of the structures of power” and a work that reveals “scathing images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and failures.”
Work that lives and will live
Mario Vargas Llosa began in writing influenced by the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and his fame was soon projected with his second novel, “The City and the Dogs”, edited in 1963, which added other hits such as “The Green House” (1966), the monumental “Conversation in N’a Cathedral” (1969), “Aunt Julia and the Write” “The Chibo Party” (2000).
In 1981, he published “The War of the End of the World”, about the War of Canudos, a book he dedicated to Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha, author of “Os Sertões”.
In addition to novels, which include comedy, mystery, history and politics, Mario Vargas Llosa also wrote theater, rehearsal, memories, literary criticism and journalistic texts, collaborating with newspapers such as Spanish El País, Brazilian Estadão and France Presse agency.
His passing passage from socialism to the center-right wing earned him some criticism and controversy, but Mario Vargas Llosa has always asserted himself as someone against authoritarian currents.
At the time of receiving the Swedish Academy Award, the writer quoted as an example of Democrat’s “curriculum”, his opposition to dictatorships, both from left and Cuba’s case, case -right, case of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.
In 2021, he saw his name involved in the case of Panama Papersin which, according to journalistic investigations, the writer would have created a company in a fiscal paradise.
In addition to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa was distinguished throughout his literary career, with several other awards such as Rómulo Gallegos (1967), Princess of Asturias (1986), Planet (1993), Miguel de Cervantes (1994), Jerusalem (1995), National Book Critics Circle Award, Pen/Nabokov (2002) and Cino del Duca World Award (2008).
He received several degrees of doctor ‘Honoris Causa’, attributed by universities in Europe, America and Asia. He was also a member of the Peruvian Academy of Languages since 1977, from the Royal Española Academy (RAE) since 1994, and has been part of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2014.
In 2024, after he returned to his home country, he published his last romance, “I dedicate my silence”.
