Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa is arguably the most relevant contemporary novelist of the Spanish language, and in 2010, at 74, after spending a lifetime as a perpetual nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was finally awarded the distinction by the Swedish Academy. The decision did not come without controversy. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Vargas Llosa was a fierce pro-Fidel Castro socialist, a disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre who defended the principle of political engagement as central to the role of all intellectuals. In the following decades, he underwent a radical ideological change, propelled by the influence of political philosophers like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. Once an enfant terrible adored by the international left, Vargas Llosa came to be seen as the staunchest of right-wing politicians in his native Peru (where he was a presidential candidate in 1990) and the Hispanic world all over. In that context, it was believed, the left-leaning Swedish Academy was never going to recognize the extraordinary merit of his literary career.
Among Vargas Llosa's books there are some of the most complex, thoroughly modern, masterly executed fictions of the second half of the twentieth century in any language, including The War of the End of the World, The Green House, Conversation in The Cathedral, and The Feast of the Goat. Each one is a penetrating inquiry on the consequences of authoritarian power, the monstrosity of dictatorship, and the difficulties to tell civilizing processes apart from mere colonialism. Vargas Llosa's award seems to close the cycle of the so-called Latin American Boom, the literary generation in which he was joined by other stellar writers from the region, like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar.
» Read more about Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize.
|
