Vargas Llosa Wins 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

--edited by Peg White; with thanks and acknowledgement to Amazon.com
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Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, 74, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature today (October 7). One of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, he has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays.

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Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936. In 1958 he earned a scholarship to study in Madrid, and later he lived in Paris. His first story collection, The Cubs and Other Stories, was published in 1959. Vargas Llosa's reputation grew with the publication in 1963 of The Time of the Hero, a controversial novel about the politics of his country. The Peruvian military burned a thousand copies of the book. He continued to live abroad until 1980, returning to Lima just before the restoration of democratic rule.

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In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru. In 1994, FSG published his memoir, A Fish in the Water, in which he recorded his campaign experience. In 1994, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded to writers whose work expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society.
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His body of work includes over 30 novels, plays, and essays, and his most recent novel, El Sueño del Celta (Celtic Dream), will be published on November 3, 2010. Two works of nonfiction are planned for the near future as well.

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For those new to Vargas Llosa, or for those wishing to read more of his work, The Copper Queen Library owns several of his books – with more on order from the publishers, and more available through Interlibrary Loan.

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Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982) – This novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals: his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair, and a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.

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Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

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Conversation in the Cathedral (1984) – The conversation takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town.

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Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis, this is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation.
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Death in the Andes (1996) - People have been mysteriously disappearing in the remote mining communities of the Andes, where the inhabitants are more likely to speak the Incan language Quechua than Spanish. Some blame the heavily armed bands of teenage Sendero Luminoso guerrillas that periodically descend on the villages to conduct mock trials and execute "imperialist lackeys." Others blame the equally bloodthirsty government troops.

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Danish anthropologist Paul Stirmsson suspects that some of the recent victims may have been killed in ritual sacrifices to appease pre-Columbian gods and demons. A witch named Dona Adriana and her husband, Dionisio, whose drunken antics recall the Dionysian revels of Greek antiquity, are the prime suspects. The author makes no attempt to assess the Senderistas in political terms. Instead, he offers a sort of Diane Arbus portrait gallery of rural Peru, set in an entertaining detective novel format.

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The Green House (1985) – This classic early novel takes place in a Peruvian town, situated between desert and jungle, which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, setting in motion a chain reaction with extraordinary consequences.

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This brothel, called the Green House, brings together the innocent and the corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the nuns only to become a prostitute; Father Garcia, struggling for the church; and four best friends drawn to both excitement and escape. The conflicting forces that haunt the Green House evoke a world balanced between savagery and civilization – and one that is cursed by not being able to discern between the two.
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In Praise of the Stepmother (1990) - Vargas Llosa's brief novel dramatizes – but in most undramatic terms – a triangle involving Don Rigoberto, his second wife, Lucrecia, and Rigoberto's seemingly cherubic young son, Alfonso (“Fonsito”). Set forth as a series of tableaux inspired by master paintings (reproduced in color), the novel eventually reveals itself as the actual instrument by which the son destroys his father's new marriage.
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The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998) - Readers familiar with Vargas Llosa's work will recognize Don Rigoberto from In Praise of the Stepmother, in which the author first introduced the middle-aged insurance executive, his beautiful second wife, Lucrecia, and his seemingly innocent son, Alfonsito, who does whatever it takes to break up their marriage. In Praise… ends with Lucrecia's expulsion from the household and the revelation that Fonsito had orchestrated the whole thing from the beginning for reasons of his own.

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Now, in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Vargas Llosa picks up where he left off, with Alfonsito's reappearance on the doorstep of Lucrecia's new home. Once again, this "Beelzebub, a viper with the face of an angel" has a hidden agenda – this time, apparently, to reunite his father and stepmother.
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The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1986) – The setting is Peru in the near future, a military dictatorship besieged by Cuban-backed rebels and defended by U.S. Marines. An unnamed writer interviews people who were involved with his former classmate, Mayta, an idealistic radical whose journey through the various sects of the Peruvian left eventually led to his participation in a pathetic, doomed uprising in 1958. The writer seeks to understand what prompted Mayta to make this futile gesture but finds only a tangle of disputed facts and self-serving statements; Mayta, he is told, was a homosexual, a police informant, even a thief.

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What is the truth?
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To those he interviews, the narrator readily admits his intention to write a novel, and the novel he writes is a skillful blend of events and his investigations into them. When asked why he goes to so much trouble digging up the past, he answers, "Because I'm a realist, in my novels I always try to lie knowing why I do it." The real fascination in this novel is that it is the story of its own creation.
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The Storyteller (1989) - Alternating chapters tell the stories of the Machiguenas – a tiny, isolated Indian tribe threatened both by greedy rubber barons destroying the Amazon jungle and by missionaries who want to bring them into the 20th century – and Saul Zuratas, a man obsessed with preserving their culture.

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Saul, called Mascarita because of a disfiguring facial birthmark, and doubly an outsider because he is a Jew, has a particular sensitivity to this primitive tribe that seeks to live peacefully with the natural world. The narrative alternates the story of Saul's obsession with chapters relating the Machiguengas' myths – stories handed down by the hablador, or storyteller.

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Who Killed Palomino Molero? (1988) - The time is the 1950s, the place is Peru, and the victim is a young Air Force enlisted man named Palomino Molero in this spare, tightly written and excellently constructed whodunit. Palomino Molero, eighteen years old, a guitar player who enchanted everyone for miles around singing boleros, is found brutally tortured and murdered near a local air force base. Two civil guards, Officer Lituma and Lieutenant Silva, try to unravel the crime.

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Rumors abound all over the place; the victim was involved in smuggling or the like and the higher-ups are covering up the perpetrators. But when Silva and Lituma find out that what Palomino Molero was involved in was not smuggling but a love affair with the daughter of his base commander, the plot thickens in all kinds of ways. Vargas Llosa's book is not only a crime novel; it is a bitter indictment of the social/racial conflicts of modern Peru, where an airman cannot fall in love with the daughter of a colonel – especially if she is white and he is not.
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A Writer's Reality (1991) - In this revealing examination of the art of fiction writing, Vargas Llosa discloses his personal vision of his craft. Based on a series of lectures delivered at Syracuse University, these eight essays delve into what Vargas Llosa sees as a writer's raison d'etre: the transformation of lies into truth. He begins by praising Borges' contribution to Latin American literature, then chronicles the development of fiction as filtered through the history of Peruvian culture; the remaining six essays document the process of fiction writing in six of his novels. His frank approach provides valuable insight into the work of an artist.