Mario Vargas Llosa is enough

Mario Vargas Llosa, who as a man wanted to be president of Peru, dismissively looked down on non-imperial and pre-Columbian languages and was belligerent toward all indigenous demands, including Catalan. But as a writer, he made The Feast of the Goat.

The Feast of the Goat It's such an admirable masterpiece that it forces me to be unable, even if I wanted to, to separate the work from the author. I would like to be able to ignore that book, to boycott it personally. But I find it impossible. There are works that move us for the audacity of their approach, others for their style, so novel, so synthetic, or so overflowing. But this one of his is something else. It's the work of a gifted person; no one could imitate it. Not even he himself, with other similar projects (novelizing a historical event with many real characters and some invented ones), has been able to reach his true self.

Ferran Torrent and I have spoken for a long time about this work. A work that changes your moral perception. "And me, what could I do?" you ask yourself as you read it. Because when you read it, you are there, right there, in that room where poor Urania Cabral, the teenager (a fictional character), is handed over by her father, as an offering, to the dictator Leónidas Trujillo (a real character). You're also in the torture chamber, at the end of the book, and days and days will pass in which you'll remember moments and phrases, and you'll never be able to forget them.

I don't care who Vargas Llosa was, because I would very much like not to like this book or any other books. How Aunt Julia and the writer either The War of the End of the World, so well done that reading it makes you start to die of thirst, of thirst, and you have to drink water, because it burns your throat. I don't know how you separate the work from the author, when the author has done things in life that disappoint you, if you find the work admirable. So much so, that you'd want everyone to read it, just so you could talk about it for a while. I've never read anything like it.