All Global News on One Page

Today’s guest post is from Cuban writer, photographer and blogger, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.
Our Vargas Llosa who art in Nobel…
by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
I came to Mario Vargas Llosa late in life, thanks to a mention of him in a short story written by Senal Paz, which Paz later adapted for the script of the Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate.
Dramaturgically, even within the script, all the chatter about Cuban censorship always seemed ridiculous to me, a sign of more of ignorance than intolerance. Not on the part of Senal Paz, of course, but by our nationalized cultural establishment. A system that at the turning of the new century, and new millennium, is still atoning for its sins of the ’70s.
I am referring not only to the narrative of Vargas Llosa, which would be perfectly digestible for local publishers (a narrative that goes from brilliant to conservative without ever taking on the tone of a pamphlet), but his thoughtful prose; this exquisite essayist, more than mortified at the Marxist idiots of the island proletariat, could never be branded a “reactionary” and much less a “rightest” (not forgetting that the reactionary right, in addition to the disasters it shares with the “left” and its “revolutionaries,” has also played many worthy roles in contemporary history).
The important thing is that Mario Vargas Llosa survived the powerful prejudices against his “eternal candidacy” at the Academy in Stockholm, until now when he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Hallelujah for the man from Arequipa! Those of us who are going to read you again, salute you…
Beyond the Peruvian presidential episode (just another part of the latin soap opera, or perhaps the Ladino American one); setting aside the jealous punch in the face dealt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in February 1976; discounting his island illusions of one or another slogan within the Cuban Revolution (smart intellectuals are converted by definition); Varga Llosa has been a gallant gladiator. An inveterate polemicist against all odds. A humanist heretic against the fires the ideological inquisition. A light in the times of the blackouts. A committed writer, save with the idiotic notion of the “committed writer.” An incorruptible comrade, despite other complicit comrades. An old-fashioned liberal, despite the neoliberals. A man of rebel rhetoric who one day said No.
And this is not a note of praise commissioned by the editorial board. This is not a note of praise.
The conceptual wasteland uninhabited by Cuban writers today, leave us, paradoxically, in a crazy and talkative freedom. In the middle of the desert, we drink from any source, faithful or contaminated; our relativism makes us hedonistic and ahistorical, a perfect pasture for plurality. In the middle of the barbed wire fence of impertinent permissions even to shut up, we soon discover that we are alone, abandoned by our own stinginess, like the guild that shouldn’t bite the ministerial hand that feeds it (Oedipal complex). In the midst of paralyzing fear that exhausts even the crime genre, here and now we can speak by writing, each with his true or implausible voice.
We could, and knew when and how to, kick with words, but simply did not want to play the star. So the Nobel Prize in Literature for a compatriot was cut forever in 1980 with that phone call from Sweden, that bumped into Alejo Carpentier, already a cadaver (novelistically he had died two diplomatic decades earlier).
So, despite the opinion of a surprised Mario Vargas Llosa, personally I hope that he has not been given this maximum laurel only for his literary work, but also for his political views put into black and white with a startling clarity, with ethical and aesthetic reasoning, without concessions to any dense Utopia nor atrocious tyranny of the market, narrated in the sea for the sake of a vision of the end of the world which, however, did not yield to defeatism, much less despotism. Latin America owes a great deal to Varga Llosa, like the fiction of an encircling range of States never altogether modern: at times from strongman rule to cretinism, at times from the barbarous to the ludicrous (Cuba as a canon of all things). And this Peruvian, citizen not of Spain but of the planet, has been critically understanding with a sparse reality that breathes with more vitality within his work than outside of it.
Moreover, the Nobel Prize, like all civilized activity, is and should be, also, political (though not politicized). Literature is too important to be left in the hands of the literati.
Finally, I beg pardon in my own name for the Paleolithic perversions that have been published about Mario Vargas Llosa by the imprisoned press in my country. If I do not propose to start a petition against such newspapers, it is only so as not to expose the prevailing lack of solidarity among the intelligentsia, and also because every time the professional press touches anything in this country there’s one less piece of the pie to go around.
But the rest of the world copies loud and clear (to use the martial vocabulary of our functionaries or, better yet, of Vargas Llosa’s own character, Pantaleon), that this Nobel is as much ours as was the Cuban “boom” sparked by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose Saramago. Mario Vargas Llosa resisted and eventually his carefully chosen words have become much more significant and longer lasting than the flood of verbiage that spills from our island stage.
Yoani’s blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani and other Cuban bloggers in English.

Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/yoanisanchez

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In May, 2009, at the New York press conference for the announcement of the Man Booker International Prize shortlist (I chaired the jury), I remarked that I considered Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1981 novel “The War of the End of the World” “the book ‘War and Peace’ wanted to be.” I was half joking of course (as always), but I did hope that somehow this line would land as a blurb on all future publications of “The War of The End of the World,” because it was a novel that I had found to be so humane, so beautifully written, so wise, and so compelling that I thought it should take its place among the best of the best. Maybe now that Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize, it will.
The amazing thing about “The War of the End of the World” is that it looks at religious cults and end-of-the-world figures in such an insightful way that the reader comes from the novel feeling as though the last word has been said about this subject. Perhaps the greatest pleasure of the novel is that men and women of all types — soldiers, criminals, landowners, housewives, beggars, intellectuals, priests, believers — and all social classes are viewed with compassion and interest. No character is dismissed or overlooked, and the result is a tragic celebration of a very human thing, the sweep of an avid belief through a society, and the change and damage it leaves behind. Is the Savior figure in this novel meant to represent Jesus? Or Jim Jones? Vargas Llosa isn’t saying, and that makes it all the better.
Then I went on to Vargas Llosa’s “The Bad Girl,” a modern rewriting of Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” “The Bad Girl” is a much more worldly novel, a portrait of a young woman who, like Emme Bovary, really does not want to miss out on the world she sees portrayed in movies and fashion magazines, and will do anything, suffer anything, to join that world. It is told by her old friend, a man who will never be able to offer her what she wants. In other words, in style, subject matter, and theme, it could not be more different from “The War of the End of the World.” And that is the joy of Mario Vargas Llosa’s work — he seems to be interested in everything, and to be able to illuminate any topic in a way that is appropriate to that topic. His moral compass is always working, but so is his empathy — no point of view is so alien to him that he cannot understand it and portray it.
Vargas Llosa has had a long and productive career. Since the early 1960s, he’s written seventeen works of fiction, thirteen works of non-fiction, and three dramas. Most of his books are serious and ambitious — “The War of the End of the World” is almost six hundred pages, “Conversation in the Cathedral” is a bit longer, and “The Feast of the Goat” is four hundred pages. Some are funny — “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.” No pages are wasted — he actually has a story to tell that is about the world, not about himself, in these many pages. And readers love him — his page on Amazon is full of 5-star reviews.
We live in an age where many authors ponder their own experience over and over in styles that can be impenetrable, but Vargas Llosa looks at the world and writes about it with such wisdom that he doesn’t fear being understood (there I go again, half-joking). I don’t want to say here that Vargas Llosa is important, so you should read him — the Nobel Committee has already said that. I want to say that reading his work is moving and enjoyable in a host of ways. The Nobel Committee has reminded us that we readers have something to look forward to in the next few months. I ordered some. You should, too.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The literature of Mario Vargas Llosa has been the source of several key turning points in my life. The first was 17 years ago, during a summer marked by blackouts and the economic crisis. With the intention of borrowing The War of the End of the World, I approached a journalist expelled from his profession for ideological problems, with whom I still share my days. I keep that copy, with its cracked cover and yellowed pages, as dozens of readers have found their way with it to this Peruvian author banned in the official bookstores.
Then came the university and while I was preparing my thesis on the literature of the dictatorship in Latin America, he published his novel The Feast of the Goat. My including an analysis of his text on Trujillo gave no pleasure to the panel that evaluated me. Nor did they like the fact that of the characteristic of the American caudillos, I highlighted only those displayed by “our own” Maximum Leader. Thus, the second time a book by today’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature marked my life, because it made me realize how frustrating it was to be a philologist in Cuba. Why do I need a title — he told me — that announces I am a specialist in language and words, when I may not even freely assemble sentences.
So Vargas Llosa and his literature are responsible, in a direct and “premeditated” way, for much of who I am today: for my matrimonial happiness and my aversion to totalitarianism, for my betrayal of philology and approach to journalism.
I am preparing myself now, because I fear that the next time a book of his falls into my hands its effect will last another 17 years, and once again slam the door on my profession.
Yoani’s blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani and other Cuban bloggers in English.

Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/yoanisanchez

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com