Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

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The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabríel Garcia Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”

In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru and has been an outspoken activist in his native country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/books/08nobel.html

[bherrera]

1. Not a bad choice

Vargas Llosa may now carry more weight as he criticizes governments in the Americas.

[rabs]

2. A few facts about VLL

After noticing that a lot of media is tripping over themselves in praising VLL.

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As a young man he was a commited communist. Later in adulthood he veered sharply to the right, supporting neo-liberal and free-market agendas.

Many Peruvians think of him as a pure racist, especially against the Quecha and Aymara natives of the Andes region, and the poor chollos and mestizos of Peru.

In 1990 he ran against Alberto Fujimori, a totally unknown engineer with NO political experience at all. By that time VLL was already an acclaimed author, yet Fujimori beat him.

In Peru at the time it was said that VLL hated to campaign in the Andean villages because he hated to get his shoes dusty, that that the poor stank.

He once was quoted as saying real Peruvians had only been in Peru for 500 years. It was a clear reference that the only Peruvians who counted for him had arrived with the Spanish colonizers and that the indigenous who have populated Peru for thousands of years were nothing.

After Fujimori blew him out in the election, about a month later VLL, in a fit of outrage applied for and received Spanish citizenship. He lives in Europe (Madrid and London) most of the time now, returning to Peru for visits now and then.

His personal life resulted in his marrying, while still in his teen years, a Bolivian woman, Julia Urquidi, who was 33 at the time. They divorced after nine years.

Then he married his FIRST COUSIN, Patricia Llosa, who was 10 younger.

There is a famous incident in which he punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate from Colombia, during a chance encounter in Mexico City.

In Peru it was said at the time that Garcia Marquez had been advising Patricia to leave VLL because he was a "mujeriego," a womanizer who was cheating on her. So VLL punched Garcia Marquez "por lo que les has dicho a mi mujer." (for what you have told my wife.)

In an interview published in Lima a couple of days ago after he was awarded the Nobel, VLL proclaimed that "I am Peru."

That pissed off a lot of Peruvians, who say THEY are the real Peruvians, not VLL, who although he was born in Peru, does not even live in the country and became a citizen of Spain in 1990.

The matter is that many Peruvians consider that VLL's Nobel was a PERSONAL award by the Nobel Academy and not a real honor for Peru in general.

[Judi Lynn]

3. So glad to read your comments, so very glad. It was shocking to see he was nominated.

Made it appear the award committee has gone completely mad. Astonishing choice, not unlike the one they made with Henry Kissinger!

He has spent so much time in recent years trying to attack the new Latin American leaders he seems absolutely diseased, a complete fascist suck-up toadie.

The facts you've presented give a very useful structure, one which clearly makes total sense.

Thank you very much. :hi:

[bherrera]

4. Free market is not "radical to the right"

Communism is an obsolete system, based on flawed economic analysis by a mediocre man who could never make an honest living, an agitator whose life was funded by his friend Engels, and who lacked the moral fortitude to acknowlege his son by a servant. The hero of the proletariat was a soft, mentally weak, and immoral person. And his theories are known failures. Now that Cuba is turning to a more practical form of market economy, what do you have left? North Korea? Vargas Llosa realized, as he became older, wiser, and better educated, that communism is not practical, and that pragmatic market-based socialism like we practice in Europe is much better.

[bemildred]

5. I have read a few of his works in translation.

Allowing for the defects of translation, which results in what is really a new work, I will say:

1.) He can write, he is a "good read".
2.) He's subject matter was not to my taste.
3.) Unlike Proust, for example, he does not have insight into other peoples motives, he does not make the strangeness of other people interesting or intelligible, it's all surface, but he is an excellent reporter on himself and what he understands. A lot of very good novelists are like that.
4.) I respect the Nobel literature committee and what it tries to do, and I'll probably read some more VLL just to see if I missed something.

I appreciate your comments in any case, though I sort of knew where he was at politically from what I have read.