Vargas Llosa, the writer with a deep connection to Barcelona
Beyond his controversial political opinions, the author has left behind great novels, such as 'The City and the Dogs' and 'Conversation in the Cathedral'
BarcelonaWhen Mario Vargas Llosa He won the Nobel Prize in 2010. In Catalonia, he was best remembered for his five-year stay in Barcelona and as one of the driving forces behind the Latin American boom. He settled in the city in 1970 and stayed until 1974. During that five-year period, the Peruvian author wrote the novel Pantaleón and the visitors (Seix Barral, 1973) and the essay The perpetual orgy (Taurus, 1975), focused on one of the authors he most admired, Gustave Flaubert. "At that time, Barcelona was the cultural capital of Spain, the place where young people from Latin America went. It was where it should be. A cosmopolitan city where Spaniards went when they wanted to hear that they were in Europe," he explained.
His relationship with the city began way back: even before his professional and friendly relationship with Carlos Barral—which began with his awarding of the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1962 for The city and the dogs–, Vargas Llosa had debuted with another Barcelona publishing house, Roca, with The bosses (1959). In fact, at that time he spent time in Calafell, at Barral's house, where Vargas Llosa was working on his novels. From 1969 onwards, his literary agent would be Carmen Balcells, which tied him inextricably to the Catalan capital, where he returned periodically: it was in Barcelona where he collected the Planeta Prize in 1993 for Lituma in the Andes and where he presented one of his latest books, The still gaze (Alfaguara, 2022), about Benito Pérez Galdós, accompanied by Javier Cercas. At that time, Vargas Llosa had become, for many Catalans, an uncomfortable and unpleasant public figure. The "elementary provincialism" that the Peruvian author saw in the independence process, which culminated on October 1, 2017, with the holding of the referendum that he called "illegal, anachronistic, and absurd," motivated him to become one of the most critical voices against the
Politically, Vargas Llosa ended up distinguishing himself for his conservatism: he was critical of the "left-wing alternatives" in Peru, Chile, and Colombia and even pointed to the indigenous movements in his country as a "democratic danger." Still, his early commitment to communism had made him sympathetic to Fidel Castro: in the 1960s he believed that the 1959 Cuban revolution would help free Latin America "from anachronism and horror," but a decade later he was already signing an anti-Castro manifesto for having closed the anti-Castro manifesto.
Vargas Llosa's range of literary influences ranges from Jean-Paul Sartre to William Faulkner, from Leo Tolstoy in Thomas Mann, from James Joyce to Francis Scott Fitzgerald. He also admired the Throwing the White by Joanot Martorell, to whom he dedicated a complimentary essay, Battle card for Tirant lo Blanc (Alliance), on a date as far back as 1969. Perhaps after his death the writer's intrinsically literary side can begin to be vindicated: for decades he distinguished himself with a healthy formal investigation, which is evident in novels such as The green house (Seix Barral, 1966) and Conversation in the Cathedral (Seix Barral, 1969), combined with forays into genres such as autofiction, both in The city and the dogs (1963) as in the controversial Aunt Julia and the writer (Seix Barral, 1977), in which he explained his relationship with a relative fourteen years older than him: Vargas Llosa married this aunt-in-law, Julia Orquidi, when he was not yet 20 years old.
The writer was also an outstanding historical novelist, with examples such as The War of the End of the World (Seix Barral, 1981), in which he reconstructed, over almost 1,000 pages, a religious rebellion in Brazil at the end of the 19th century, and The Feast of the Goat (Alfaguara, 2000), about the fall of dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. In addition to leaving behind some twenty novels, Vargas Llosa published a dozen essays—among them the essential The truth of lies (Seix Barral, 1990) – and hundreds of articles. He also wrote plays such as The Thousand and One Nights (2008), which he performed alongside Aitana Sánchez-Gijón. The only genre that eluded him was poetry.
