The role of autobiography, biography, and history in the works of Mario Vargas Llosa. On the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa

Abstract

On this occasion the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to an author that Spanish readers know very well. This author's career has been significantly linked to the city of Barcelona since its early stages. Born in Peru (Arequipa, 1936), he was both student and worked as an instructor for a short time at San Marcos University in Lima, but soon won a scholarship that allowed him to move to Madrid to write his doctoral thesis. As early as 1953 he received the Leopoldo Alas Prize for stories, in Barcelona, for Los jefes, and a few years later he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1962 for La ciudad y los perros. This novel is considered by some critics as the launch of the 'boom' that brought together the authors of his generation and others before. Barcelona became, then, the center of the new Latin American literature, with the presence of García Márquez, Donoso, and Vargas Llosa himself. The centers of attention were the publisher Seix Barral (with Carlos Barral at the front) and his literary agent, Carmen Balcells. But Vargas Llosa's literary development was born from an autobiographical realism, the condemnation of dictatorships, as in Conversación en la Catedral, which takes place during the dictatorship of Peruvian General Manuel Odría, or La fiesta del chivo (about Torrijos). A prolific writer, he never abandoned a sense of realism, even if his novels were set in places as diverse as the city, the Amazon rainforest, Brazil, Paris in the nineteenth century, or Africa. At a given time, he defended Joanot Martorell's novel Tirant lo Blanc, as a model. He has cultivated literary criticism with splendid books on García Márquez, Flaubert, Victor Hugo and Oneto, among others; and journalism, autobiography and active politics such as when he ran for president in his country. He is a writer of ideas and his dedication to literature has been relentless.