Artistic and Literature in Spanish America Mario Vargas Llosa Dra. Patricia Nigro

Artistic and Literature in Spanish America

Mario Vargas Llosa

Dra. Patricia Nigro

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Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-)

• Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family in 1936, in the Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta (the former a mestizo pilot, the latter the daughter of an old criollo family), who separated a few months before his birth.

• After Mario's birth, his father revealed that he was having an affair with a German woman; consequently, Mario has two younger half-brothers: Enrique and Ernesto Vargas.


• Vargas Llosa lived with his maternal family in

Arequipa until a year after his parents'

divorce, when his maternal grandfather was

named honorary consul for Perú in Bolivia.

• With his mother and her family, Vargas Llosa

then moved to Cochabamba, where he

spent the early years of his childhood. His

maternal family, the Llosas, were sustained

by his grandfather, who managed a cotton

farm. As a child, Vargas Llosa was led to

believe that his father had died—his mother

and her family did not want to explain that

his parents had separated.


• During the government of

Peruvian President José

Bustamante y Rivero, Vargas

Llosa's maternal grandfather

obtained a diplomatic post in the

Peruvian coastal city of Piura

and the entire family returned to

Perú. While in Piura, Vargas

Llosa attended elementary

school at the religious academy

Colegio Salesiano.


• In 1946, at the age of ten, he

moved to Lima and met his father

for the first time. His parents re-

established their relationship and

lived in Magdalena del Mar, a

middle-class Lima suburb, during

his teenage years.

• While in Lima, he studied at the

Colegio La Salle, a Christian middle

school, from 1947 to 1949.


• When Vargas Llosa was 14, his father sent him to the

Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima. A year

before his graduation, Vargas Llosa began working as

an amateur journalist for local newspapers.

• He withdrew from the military academy and finished his

studies in Piura, where he worked for the local

newspaper, La Industria, and witnessed the theatrical

performance of his first dramatic work, La huida del

Inca.

• In 1953, he enrolled in Lima's National

University of San Marcos to study law

and literature.

• He married Julia Urquidi, his maternal

uncle's sister-in-law, in 1955 at the age

of 19; she was 13 years older.

• He began his literary career in 1957 with

the publication of his first short stories,

"The Leaders" ("Los jefes") while working

for two Peruvian newspapers.

• Thereafter, his stories began to appear in

Peruvian literary reviews.


• Upon his graduation in 1958, he received a scholarship to study

at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain.

• In 1960, after his scholarship had expired, he moved to France

under the impression that he would receive a scholarship to

study there; however, his request was denied.

• Despite Mario and Julia's unexpected financial status, the couple

decided to remain in Paris where he began to write prolifically.

Their marriage lasted only a few more years, ending in divorce

in 1964.


• A year later, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia

Llosa, with whom he had three children: Álvaro Vargas Llosa

(born 1966), a writer and editor; Gonzalo (born 1967), a

businessman; and Morgana (born 1974), a photographer.


• Vargas Llosa’s first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963; “The City and the Dogs”; Eng. trans. The Time of the Hero), was widely acclaimed. Translated into more than a dozen languages, this novel, set in the Leoncio Prado Military School, describes adolescents striving for survival in a hostile and violent environment.

• The corruption of the military school reflects the larger malaise afflicting Perú. The book was filmed twice, in Spanish (1985) and in Russian (1986), the second time as Yaguar.



• The novel La casa verde (1966; The Green House), set in the Peruvian jungle, combines mythical, popular, and heroic elements to capture the sordid, tragic, and fragmented reality of its characters.

• Los cachorros (1967; The Cubs, and Other Stories, filmed 1973) is a psychoanalytical portrayal of an adolescent who has been accidentally castrated.


• Conversación en la catedral

(1969; Conversation in the

Cathedral) deals with Manuel

Odría’s regime (1948–56).

• The novel Pantaleón y las

visitadoras (1973; “Pantaleón

and the Visitors”; Eng. trans.

Captain Pantoja and the Special

Service, filmed 2000) is a satire

of the Peruvian military and

religious fanaticism.


• His semiautobiographical novel La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, filmed 1990 as Tune in Tomorrow) combines two distinct narrative points of view to provide a contrapuntal effect.

• Vargas Llosa also wrote a critical study of the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez in García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (1971); “García Márquez: Story of a God-Killer”).


• After living three years in London, he was a writer-in-residence at Washington State University in 1969.

• In 1970, he settled in Barcelona. He lectured and taught widely throughout the world.

• His critical essays in English translation were published in 1978. La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World), an account of the 19th-century political conflicts in Brazil, became a best seller.


• Three of his plays— La señorita de Tacna (1981; The Young Lady of Tacna), Kathie y el hipopótamo (1983; Kathie and the Hippopotamus), and La chunga (1986; “The Jest”; Eng. trans. La chunga)—were published in Three Plays (1990).


• Like many Latin American authors, Vargas

Llosa has been politically active

throughout his career; over the course of

his life, he has gradually moved from the

political left towards the right.

• While he initially supported the Cuban

revolutionary government of Fidel Castro,

he later became disenchanted.

• He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990

with the center-right Frente

Democrático (FREDEMO) coalition,

advocating neoliberal reforms.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Fredemo-vargasllosa.jpg


• In 1990, he lost his bid for the

presidency of Perú in a runoff

against Alberto Fujimori, an

agricultural engineer and the

son of Japanese immigrants.

• Vargas Llosa wrote about this

experience in El pez en el agua:

memorias (1993; A Fish in the

Water: A Memoir).


• He has subsequently supported

moderate conservative

candidates.

• He became a citizen of Spain in

1993 and was awarded the

Cervantes Prize in 1994.

Despite his new nationality, he

continued to write about Perú in

such novels as Los cuadernos

de don Rigoberto (1997; The

Notebooks of Don Rigoberto).


• His later works include the

novels La fiesta del chivo

(2000; The Feast of the Goat), El

paraíso en la otra esquina

(2003; The Way to Paradise),

2006 – Travesuras de la niña

mala (The Bad Girl, 2007).

• Other non fiction works are 2004

– La tentación de lo imposible

(The Temptation of the

Impossible); 2009 – El Viaje a la

Ficción (A trip to fiction).

• Many of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. Another change over his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism to a sometimes playful postmodernism.


Mario Vargas Llosa (1936)

• Mario Vargas Llosa is considered a

major Latin American writer,

alongside other greats such as

Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis

Borges, Gabriel García

Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

In his book The New Novel in Latin

America (La Nueva Novela),

Fuentes offers an in-depth literary

criticism of the positive influence

Vargas Llosa's work has had on

Latin American literature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mario_Vargas_Llosa.jpg


• Mario Vargas Llosa won the

Nobel Prize in Literature in

2010.

• He very well deserved it

because of his wonderful and

huge work as a writer.

• His last novel is El sueño del

celta (2010) (The dream of the

celt).


• Mario Vargas Llosa has been working

as a journalist since he was a

teenager.

• Now he writes for important

newspapers as The New York Times or

El País (Spain).

• Several books collect his articles and

interviews such as

• Diario de Irak (A Journal of Irak, 2003);

Israel-Palestina. Paz o Guerra Santa

(2006); Sables y utopías (2009).

Documents

Artistic and Literature in Spanish America Mario Vargas Llosa Dra. Patricia Nigro