Mario Vargas Llosa by Raymond Leslie Williams

Mario Vargas Llosa by Raymond Leslie Williams

Author:Raymond Leslie Williams [Williams, Raymond Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


PART III

Rereading Vargas Llosa

All of Vargas Llosa’s sixteen novels have to do, to varying degrees, with trauma, loss, and dealing with these and closely related issues as they surface in his writing in the form of constant themes and “obsessions,” as many critics are wont to call them. In his most elaborately constructed and lengthy works—his five “total” novels—he approaches and confronts his most deep-seated traumas, “demons,” and “obsessions,” beginning with the abusive paternal figure, the loss of his childhood paradise (his utopia of early childhood in Cochabamba), and the loss of the mother figure as he had known her. This is, to some extent, the subject matter of La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta. These five voluminous “total” novels are the central work of a major Latin American modernist novelist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a Nobel laureate.

In the least elaborately constructed and more brief novels—his six “entertainments”—Vargas Llosa not only critiques the societal institutions most closely related to his “demons” and “obsessions” (the military, the Catholic Church, traditional political parties, and the like) but also ridicules himself. These are the humorous novels of satire and self-parody. A Vargas Llosa figure appears in each of these six entertainments: Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La tía Julia y el escribidor, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, Elogio de la madrastra, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, and Travesuras de la niña mala. These six novels are the work of a professional writer who is secure enough in his writing career and mature enough in his life to find humor in his most cherished personal and professional defects, as well as enough of a storyteller to construct entertaining stories about all of this. The more informed the reader might be about matters such as Mario Vargas Llosa as a writer, a political thinker, and a person, the more amusing these six novels can be. The ideal audience for these six entertainments is the “Mario-Vargas-Llosa-reader.”1

The five remaining novels that have not been identified as the “total” novels or the “entertainments”—La ciudad y los perros, Historia de Mayta, El hablador, Lituma en los Andes, and El paraíso en la otra esquina do not aspire to create the illusion of totality, nor are they humorous and lightly self-deprecating entertainments. These are the work of a writer dealing with his Peruvian circumstance as he has lived the experience of childhood, a military school, the discovery of storytelling in the Amazonian jungle, armed guerrilla insurrection, sexuality, and Peru’s past. These all have something to do with Vargas Llosa’s traumas and losses, they were probably the most painful and unpleasant to actually write, and they might well be the most unpleasant of his works to read.

THE MODERN NOVEL OF CHIVALRY: THE ENTERTAINMENTS

The entertainment value of these six novels depends to a large degree on their amusing and engaging plots, but these are also Vargas Llosa’s novels about readers (and particularly about readers of Vargas Llosa’s novels) and writers (to a large degree, about the writer Mario Vargas Llosa).



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