Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa


Book Description

This collection of essays associated with Mario Vargas Llosa’s visits to the City College of New York offers readers an opportunity to learn about his body of work through his own perspective and those of key fiction writers and literary critics.




Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa


Book Description

The essays included in Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa celebrate Mario Vargas Llosa's visits to the City College of New York, the creation of the Cátedra Vargas Llosa in his honor, and the interests of the Peruvian author in reading and books. This volume contains previously unpublished material by Vargas Llosa himself, as well as by novelists and literary critics associated with the Cátedra. This collection offers readers an opportunity to learn about Vargas Llosa's body of work through multiple perspectives: his own and those of eminent fiction writers and important literary critics. The book offers significant analysis and rich conversation that bring to life many of the Nobel Laureate's characters and provide insights into his writing process and imagination. As the last surviving member of the original group of writers of the Latin American Boom--which included Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar--Vargas Llosa endures as a literary icon because his fiction has remained fresh and innovative. His prolific works span many different themes and subgenres. A combination of literary analyses and anecdotal contributions in this volume reveal the little-known human and intellectual dimensions of Vargas Llosa the writer and Vargas Llosa the man.




The Discreet Hero


Book Description

In this tale of two Peruvians in separate cities who each stand up to injustice, the Nobel laureate is “a master playing at his craft” (Los Angeles Times). Felícito Yanaqué, a small businessman in the Peruvian city of Piura, finds himself the victim of blackmail—and finds within himself the will to refuse. Meanwhile, Ismael Carrera, a successful owner of an insurance company in Lima, cooks up a plan to avenge himself against the two lazy sons who want him dead. As their small acts of rebellion unfold, their lives are destined to intersect. In The Discreet Hero, Vargas Llosa examines the possibilities of honorable individuals who insist on taking control of their destinies. He also revisits some unforgettable characters from his previous novels: Sergeant Lituma, Don Rigoberto, Doña Lucrecia, and Fonchito are all here in a prosperous Peru. Vargas Llosa sketches Piura and Lima vividly—and the cities become not merely physical spaces but realms of the imagination populated by his vivid characters. A novel whose humor and pathos shine through in Edith Grossman’s masterly translation, The Discreet Hero is another remarkable achievement from the finest Latin American novelist at work today.




Conversation in the Cathedral


Book Description

A Haunting tale of power, corruption, and the complex search for identity Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town. Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis, Conversation in The Cathedral is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation.




The Language of Passion


Book Description

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Internationally acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has contributed a biweekly column to Spain's major newspaper, El País, since 1977. In this collection of columns from the 1990s, Vargas Llosa weighs in on the burning questions of the last decade, including the travails of Latin American democracy, the role of religion in civic life, and the future of globalization. But Vargas Llosa's influence is hardly limited to politics. In some of the liveliest critical writing of his career, he makes a pilgrimage to Bob Marley's shrine in Jamaica, celebrates the sexual abandon of Carnaval in Rio, and examines the legacies of Vermeer, Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others.




Notes on the Death of Culture


Book Description

The Peruvian Nobel laureate presents a collection of essays on the decline of intellectual life in the age of media spectacle. In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation—penned by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics. Taking his cues from T.S. Eliot—whose essay “Notes Toward a Definition of Culture” is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished—Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.




Letters to a Young Novelist


Book Description

The Nobel Prize–winning author’s classic on the craft of novel writing “distills [the great works] brilliantly, revealing an architecture to their greatness” (The Washington Post Book World). In Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa condenses a lifetime of writing, reading, and thought into an essential manual for aspiring writers. Drawing on the stories and novels of writers from around the globe—including Borges, Bierce, Céline, Cortázar, Faulkner, Kafka, Robbe-Grillet and others—he lays bare the inner workings of fiction, all the while urging young novelists not to lose touch with the elemental urge to create. Conversational, eloquent, and effortlessly erudite, this little book is destined to be read and re-read by young writers, old writers, would-be writers, and all those with a stake in the world of letters.




The Storyteller


Book Description

At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man...that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas's transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both.




The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto


Book Description

Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love story whose participants may be the fictional characters of Don Rigoberto. With his usual sly assurance, Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from the Don's imagination; the resulting novel, an aggregate of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling.




Harsh Times


Book Description

The true story of Guatemala’s political turmoil of the 1950s as only a master of fiction can tell it Guatemala, 1954. The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo Árbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that Árbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today. In this thrilling novel, Mario Vargas Llosa fuses reality with two fictions: that of the narrator, who freely re-creates characters and situations, and the one designed by those who would control the politics and the economy of a continent by manipulating its history. Harsh Times is a gripping, revealing novel that directly confronts recent history. No one is better suited to tell this riveting story than Vargas Llosa, and there is no form better for it than his deeply textured fiction. Not since The Feast of the Goat, his classic novel of the downfall of Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic, has Vargas Llosa combined politics, characters, and suspense so unforgettably.