Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Nobel prize for literature winner's life should not eclipse his work.

The clashes and controversies that have clustered around Mario Vargas Llosa should not distract readers from his achievements as a writer.
Posted by Maya Jaggi Thursday 7 October 2010 - The Guardian

Nobel prize for literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa greets the press after his victory was announced. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP

A dozen years after his failed presidential bid, I met Mario Vargas Llosa at his London home, and was surprised at how readily he could laugh about his political rout of 1990, when his platform of "radical liberalism" – or Andean Thatcherism – was crushed at the polls by Peru's future dictator Alberto Fujimori. Though clearly still nursing bruises from the "dirty war" of politics, he told me his campaign was a terrible mistake he could not regret. It had taught him a valuable lesson. "I learned," he said, "I'm not a politician – but a writer."

His Nobel prize is a reminder of the lasting achievements of a novelist whose inventive brilliance and influence have at times been at risk of eclipse by political spats (including that famous – and still mysterious – punch thrown at Gabriel García Márquez in a Mexico City cinema) and controversies. As a hyper-realist, rather than a magical realist, he was the precocious star of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, when, thanks to publication and re-export from Spain, Latin Americans were at last able to read each other across frontiers, as well as to win acclaim in Europe and North America. Partly inspired by Flaubert and Faulkner, his goal was the all-encompassing "total novel" that would scrutinise every aspect of his society, using multiple viewpoints and an invisible narrator to reveal the impact of political and social forces on his characters' psyches. His debut, The Time of the Hero (1963), broke ground by portraying the military academy in Lima to which he was sent as a teenager as a brutal microcosm of Peru under military rule in the late 1940s and 50s, rife with class snobbery, racial prejudice and bullying. Copies of the book, published when he was 26, were ceremonially burned in the school's grounds.

His novels, from the most excoriating works on dictatorship to the headiest postmodern romantic fictions, have drawn heavily on his own life. The Green House (1966) was set in a jungle brothel in a society governed by machismo and sexual control, and where, Vargas Llosa discovered as a cadet, the whorehouse was a "central institution in Latin American life", while Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) was informed by a teenage stint as a night-owl crime reporter in the Lima underworld. His comic masterpiece Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) alternated the tales of a Bolivian writer of radio soap operas with the tempestuous melodrama of his own eight-year marriage to his aunt, with whom he eloped when he was 19 and she 32.

Full comment at The Guardian.

More:
BBC News reported that Vargas Llosa, 74, "has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays. He is the first South American winner of the prize since 1982 when it went to Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His international breakthrough came with the 1960s novel The Time of The Hero. Born in the town of Arequipa, the writer took Spanish nationality in 1993--three years after an unsuccessful bid for the Peruvian presidency. In 1995, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor."
And:
Vargas Llosa received the news by phone this morning in the U.S., where he is "spending this semester introducing students to his philosophy of writing," according to USA Today.
"I am basically a writer, not a teacher, but I enjoy teaching because of the students, and the chance to talk to them about good literature," he said of his work at Princeton. "Good literature is not only entertainment--it is a fantastic entertainment--but it's also something that gives you a better understanding of the world in which you live."

And from PublishersLunch:
Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel for Literature

The winner of this year's prize is Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Picador, which published his novel The Bad Girl in hardcover in 2006 and in paperback in 2008, and Harvard University Press, which released the essay collection Wellsprings in 2008.

Picador Publisher Frances Coady said in a statement that as of this morning, all 10 of the author's books they publish are being reprinted: "we already have in place major bookseller promotions and no doubt we will be reprinting any more times in the months to come."

Vargas Llosa's win managed to be both a surprise, since he was not among the favorites and only reached 25-1 odds in Ladbrokes' listing, and expected, since he's been discussed as a possible candidate for the prize for years. "We're breathing an enormous sigh of relief," said Ladbrokes spokesperson David Williams in a statement. "Yet again, the judges have confounded the punters and plucked a relative outsider out of the mix. The gambles on Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Cormac McCarthy were nothing short of staggering and we saw more money bet on the contest this year than in its entire history. We'll send a crate of champagne to the winner because he's helped us dodge a massive payout."

Alas this will not be the first mainstream Nobel winner in the age of the ebook; Vargas Llosa is only available in print, though an executive from his UK publisher Faber and Faber was said to be discussing the issue with agent Carmen Balcells at lunch in Frankfurt today.

Vargas Llosa is also 2010 Distinguished Visitor in Princeton University's Program in Latin American Studies, where he's due to give a lecture in Spanish on October 11. He'll also be at the Cervantes Institute at 1 PM today for a press conference.
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