The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa - Edited by Efrain
Kristal, John KingMario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936, Arequipa, Peru)He
was concerned with the theme of corruption and its effects on
individuals and communitiesIn his novels of the period he adds
humour, irony and a new kind of literary complexity to his
repertoire and becomes interested in the theme of fanaticism, and
his new literary technique involves alternating between a realistic
register and one that is clearly imaginary, based on dreams and
fantasieshe does not dazzle his readers with the power of a wild
imagination and an equally extraordinary mastery of narrative time,
to create a sense of wonder grounded in everyday social and
political realities of common and uncommon peopleVargas Llosa is a
novelist able to persuade his readers, from the very first line of
any of his narratives, that they are being told a story of
considerable human interestThe plot is fundamentalHe was persuaded
that human dissatisfaction in Latin America was directly linked to
the shortcomings of social and economic realities, to the
corruption and injustices revolutionary action would remedy.He
developed an indirect form of discourse in which the voice of an
impersonal narrator can readily express a characters intimate
thoughts, using ambiguity and ellipses to enhance the effect.
Chapter 1: (Biography & Styles& Themes)In 1947 he would
go to Lima, and become a cadet in the military academy he would
immortalise in his first novel in 1963, The Time of the Hero (La
ciudad y los perros)The wanderings of his childhood are the first
indication of the itinerate life he would have to the present day.
From a very young age, he has been an instinctive nomad, moving
from one place to another in order to cope with life. He has lived
in countless cities and, even today, the only constant in his life
is travel.His first great novel, The Time of the Hero, indeed
begins in a sombre interior (in the uncertain glow which the light
bulb cast through the few clean pieces of glass).6 In that novel,
interior and exterior spaces are already poised against each other:
the school, the house and the city. To his characters,
nevertheless, reality is as confining as a closed spaceThe
principal holder of power, the one against whom the individual
rebels, is the father. The theme of the father is central to the
universe of Mario Vargas Llosa. The father represents the centre of
a twisted reality, the origin of an ontological evil that has
perverted the universeIn the opening of The Time of the Hero,
Jaguar does not know that he is setting off a series of events that
will lead to his decline. The novel begins with a game of chance. A
roll of the dice designates Cava as the member of the Circle who
will steal the chemistry exam. Jaguar orders Cava to get going:
Hurry, Jaguar told him again, You know, the second on the left.From
then on, the novel is a sequence of cause and effects. The theft of
the exam results in the breaking of a window in the classroom,
which leads to the punishment of the cadets, which leads to the
Slave accusing Cava. In turn, this is followed by the death of the
Slave, bringing about Albertos accusation of Jaguar as the culprit,
and Gamboas inconclusive investigation
Chapter 2: The Time of the Hero (1963)
Summary: The plot of The Time of the Hero revolves around an act
of rebellion against a school examination: a group of cadets in the
Leoncio Prado military academy, who have formed a self-defence
group known as the Circle, conspire to steal the questions for an
upcoming chemistry examination. Their crime is discovered and the
entire year loses its weekend privileges. A cadet known as the
Slave finds this unbearable, because he wants to see his new and
first ever girlfriend; in order to resolve the problem, he squeals
on Cava, the cadet who was designated to break into the office
where the questions were kept. Cava is expelled from the academy,
and at the end of the first of the novels two halves the Slave dies
of a gunshot wound. The second half sees a division among the
cadets as a result of this death; one of the middle-class students,
Alberto, known as the Poet, accuses Jaguar, one of the
working-class cadets and the leader of the Circle, of murder. The
director of the academy decides that the matter must be hushed up
for the sake of the institutions good name and refuses an
investigation (the kind of decision that governments take all the
time).
First, it explored the nature of fiction and the status of the
novel as a historical genre.it is a murder mystery and also a
detective story: who killed the character known as the Slave?The
coverup of the Slaves death completes the education of adolescent
boys, who, while they learn about maths and chemistry in school,
are also learning, both inside and outside it, that society is
corrupt, and that in future, after they graduate, it will be every
man for himself.
Three of the five strands are narrated in the third person and
two in the first person.core narrative (third-person
narration),
The Latin American Novel Today by Mario Vargas Llosa
In Spanish America, the most representative works up to the end
of the 19th century were mere echoes of French, English or at worst
Spanish writings... the novel remained an imitative and submissive
genre, stripped of originality and creative inspiration.The
primitive novelists nevertheless remained bound by the methods of
composition and the narrative language of the writers of Europe,
principally the naturalists
Mans problems, his nightmares and his ambitions are the
essential themesL.A. novel has expanded its concept of realityThe
new novelists have incorporated into fiction other dimensions of
human existence such as imagination and dreams; and themes of
fantasy have invaded the short story as well as the
novelCoexistence of reality and fantasy in wordsnby GGM, Julio
CortazarThe primitive novel conformed to a prototype: the
predominance of landscape over the individual, of content over
form, of objective life over the subjective.This inclination toward
aesthetic originality which characterizes the new Latin American
writer obviously should not be constructed as a return to
provincialism or as a total denial of Europe. On the contrary, the
curiosity and the interest that exist in Latin America with regard
to the new tendencies in narration in the rest of the world are
perhaps even more intense than in the past. The one difference is
the now the Latin American novelist no longer imitates: he
assimilates, he adapts, he modifies, he discriminates and puts to
use those imported models that are most consistent with his own
literary objectives.The Second World War interrupted for several
years the importation of European novels in Latin America should be
included as 1 of the factors that stimulated the advance of our
prose fiction turn our eyes to indigenous writers: All Latin
American novels are bad until they prove themselves otherwise; all
French and North American novels are Good until they prove
themselves otherwise.Kllmann, Sabine, Vargas Llosas Fiction &
the Demon of PoliticsUna novella es algo mas que un document
objective, es, sobre todo, un testimonio subjectivo de las razone
que llevaron a quien la escribi a convertirse en creador, en un
radical (de Riquer and Vargas 1972: 26)Mario Vargas Llosa: Author
of fictions, literary critica and theoristVargas Llosas thinking is
contra la corriente or contra viento y marea
