Alfredo Bryce Echenique, a leading figure in Latin American literature, dies at 87.

BarcelonaPeruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, one of the last exponents of the Latin American literary boom, has died at the age of 87, as announced Tuesday by the House of Peruvian Literature and the Vargas Llosa Chair on their social media accounts, and later confirmed by Peruvian writer Jorge Eduardo Benavi. Bryce Echenique wrote novels such as A world for Julius, The exaggerated life of Martín Romaña and Nighttime prisonerwho won the National Narrative Prize in 1998. Four years later he won the Planeta Prize for The garden of my belovedIn 2012, he won the Guadalajara International Book Fair award as a "great chronicler of life" with prose "full of good humor, satirical wit, and a fantastic record of orality."

Bryce Echenique was closely linked to Barcelona, ​​where he lived intermittently after leaving Peru in 1984, alternating his residence with Madrid. The Peruvian author also published much of his work with the Anagrama publishing house and was one of the writers represented by Carmen Balcells' agency, whom he considered "the best literary agent in the world." "My career wouldn't be the same without Carmen; if I've written my books, it's because of her support," he stated.

Born in Lima in 1939 into a family of bankers and a descendant of a Peruvian president, Bryce Echenique studied law in his country before going to France to study modern literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. In the French city he earned a living as a Spanish teacher and wrote his first novel, A world for Juliuswhich he finally published in 1970 to great acclaim: in 1972 he won the National Literature Prize of Peru and in 1974 the prize for best novel published in France. The novel, about the childhood of the lonely son of a wealthy Lima family and his awakening to the rigors of adult life, made him one of the key figures of the Latin American Boom of the time, which included authors such as Vargas Llosa and García Márquez, also represented by Carmen Balcells. Considered the most European of the Boom authors, he also spent long periods in Italy and Germany during the 1970s and described himself as "a loner who lives with excellent company and a pessimist who wants everything to turn out well." In Guadalajara, when he accepted the Book Fair prize, he remarked that his work was "marked by life" and distanced himself from other Latin American authors who "remained confined to Latin America, very much within its own territory."

One of his most acclaimed novels is The exaggerated life of Martín Romaña, from 1981, a kind of sentimental chronicle of the Parisian exile of Latin American intellectuals, which forms a diptych with The man who spoke of Octavia of Cadiz, from 1985. At the end of the 90s he ended his European journey to settle again in Peru; from this period of reconnecting with the world of his childhood and youth come titles such as Nighttime prisoner (1997), Tarzan's tonsillitis (1999) and the collection of short stories A Sad Guide to Paris (1999). In 2002 he returned to Barcelona and published the romantic comedy The garden of my beloved, the winner of the Planeta Prize, which follows the emotional ups and downs of the protagonist from Lima in the 1950s to Europe in the early 1970s.

Memoirs and controversies

Also noteworthy in Bryce Echenique's work is his memoiristic production, which began in 1993 with Permission to live, The first volume of his anti-memoirs is a melancholic and bittersweet summary of a fascinating first half-century of life, in which he confessed his constant worry about "arriving late" everywhere: to literature, because he had studied law first, and to the Latin American Boom, which was already waning when he made his name. In the second volume of the anti-memoirs, Permission to listenHis disappointment with Peru, which he found upon his return to the country in the late 1990s, was reflected in his writing. In the writer's later years, his literary prestige was tarnished by the controversy surrounding accusations of plagiarism in some fifteen newspaper articles published in Spanish and Catalan newspapers. In fact, in 2009 a Peruvian court ordered him to pay more than 50,000 euros for plagiarism, which provoked protests when the Guadalajara Book Fair awarded him its honorary prize. Jorge Volpi, one of the jury members, said that Bryce Echenique had been awarded "for his novels and short stories, not for his journalism."