Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa:A Retrospective Look Sara Castro-Klarén This review essay is prompted by the appearance of four important books on the work of Mario Vargas Llosa since he received the Nobel Prize in 2010. These recent and fresh approaches to the novels and politics of the Peruvian writer represent the work of established critics such as Mabel Moraña, Gene Bell-Villada, Will H. Corral and Raymond Leslie Williams as well as younger critics such as Juan de Castro, Nicholas Birns and Mark. D. Anderson. Perhaps the greatest distance in approach to publishing and doing research is embodied in two of the voluminous collections of essays published in Peru in 2011 and Mexico in 2011. Mario Vargas Llosa y la critica Peruana (Lima), conceived as homage to the Nobel winner, collects retrospectively a huge number of very short laudatory reprints drawn from newspapers and magazines since the publication of Los Jefes (1959). It is an interesting way of representing a very partial chronology of reception given the fact that Vargas Llosa and his fiction—as well as journalism—have been at the center of furious political debate in Peru since the publication of his first novel. In this regard, one of the contributors to the volume, Ramon León, observes that the "acerbas críticas" came to a halting silence and went on to express "unánime júbilo" (543) upon the conference on the Nobel Prize of the author for the report on the massacre of Uchuraccay (1983) and his novel, La Guerra del fin del mundo (1981). In comparing the similarities between the invectives poured on Vargas Llosa in Peru with previous cases of other "exiled" notable Peruvians such as President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero [End Page 536] and poet José Santos Chocano, León gives us the beginning of a good essay on the history and quality of the art of insult in Peruvian letters. Perhaps the most valuable essay in this collection is the historically informed review of El sueño del celta (2010) by Nelson Manrique. The historian registers one of the few dissenting tones in the collection when he reminds the reader of the historical context in which the nationalist Irishman Roger Casement (1864–1916) lived, struggled, wrote his dairy and met his death. Manrique argues that this novel fails because it does not construct a credible case for its chief character. The reason for such failure resides in Vargas Llosa's own antipathy for indigenismo. Despite Vargas Llosa's expressed admiration for Casement's fight for indigenous rights, Manrique argues, "MVLL simpatiza racionalmente con Roger Casement. ... Pero a un nivel mas profundo las motivaciones de su personaje le son no solo extrañas sino repudiables" (261–62). The volume edited in Mexico in 2010 by Pol Popovich, in contrast, carries as a subtitle the phrase "ensayos inéditos." The academic essays in Popovich's volume include studies on the later narrative of Vargas Llosa, but retain and rehearse many of the questions already explored by the standing criticism in the novels before the more erotic turn taken with Don Rigoberto (1997); as Roy Boland shows in his excellent essay in the volume edited by Kristal and King (102–115), "The Erotic Novels," where he makes the link between Vargas Llosa and George Bataille explicit. Nevertheless, "Desplazamientos politicos" by Oswaldo Estrada, and especially "El tiranicidio y Santo Tomas" by Claudia García Rodríguez bring up fresh questions in the quest for new and neglected approaches to Vargas Llosa's long meditation on violence. Highly influenced by Antonio Cornejo Polar's thesis on the epistemic violence of the introduction of writing at the killing of the Inca Atahualpa in Cajamarca in 1532—advanced in his Escribir en el aire; ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literatures andinas (1994) (Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures, (2013))—Ivan Teruel Caceres writes a short book in which he compares and contrasts Vargas Llosa and Arguedas, a topic often discussed in previous critical approaches to either of the two icons of contemporary Peruvian literature and by Vargas Llosa himself in La utopia arcáica

Art · Art history · Humanities · Literature · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Publishing · Silence · Sociology · Classics · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · History · Latin American Literature Analysis · Latin American Literature Studies · Law

• Ecocritical Reflections on Fiction Written by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa

  Open Access•William Flores•Humanidades revista de la…•2023

  Add to list

• A Story Teller

  Mónica X Navarro, Braulio Muñoz•Hispania•2001

  Add to list