Vargas Llosa, together with King Emeritus, whom he personally invited to the ceremony, and Infanta Cristina /
The Spanish-Peruvian Nobel Prize winner is accompanied in a crowded ceremony by Juan Carlos I and his daughter Cristina de Borbón
From Arequipa (Peru) to immortality. The Spanish-Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa is already part of the select ‘club of the immortals’, the name given to the members of the French Academy, the French equivalent of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 and declared Francophile, he is already part of the prestigious institution despite not writing in French and exceeding, at 86, the maximum age established in the regulations of this institution (75) to be a member. . He is the first author in a non-French language to join the Academy, founded in 1635.
Under the dome of the Institute of France, dressed in the black frock coat embroidered with green and gold olive branches and the sword -forged in Toledo- of French academics, Vargas Llosa gave a speech in French in which he had words of thanks and praise for his predecessor in the 18th seat, the French philosopher Michel Serres, who died in 2019. Among the guests at the ceremony were King Emeritus Juan Carlos I, who has been in exile in the United Arab Emirates since 2020 and whom Vargas Llosa personally invited to the ceremony; He came accompanied by his daughter, the Infanta Cristina, and was greeted with timid applause upon his arrival. The former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the writer’s children and his ex-wife Patricia Llosa also attended.
During his speech, the author of ‘La fiesta del chivo’ and ‘La ciudad de los perros’ explained the importance of French literature in his literary training. “In Paris, I became a writer,” he said. In the French capital he wrote his first two novels, a long story and several chronicles. “Learning French and reading the French, tirelessly, he secretly aspired to be a French writer,” revealed the author of ‘Pantaleon and the visitors’. It was in Paris where he discovered Gustave Flaubert, founder of the modern novel and one of his favorite authors, and that the French “fascinated with the Cuban Revolution, (…) had discovered Latin American literature before me, and read Borges, Cortazar, Uslar Pietri, Onetti, Octavio Paz and, later, Gabriel García Márquez».
«Thanks to France I discovered Latin America, the problems that the Latin American countries shared, the horrible legacy of the coups and underdevelopment, the guerrilla and the shared dreams of liberation. And I began, then, in France – what a paradox! – To feel like a Peruvian and Latin American writer, “he recounted.
Vargas Llosa, along with his ex-wife and their children. /
Vargas Llosa praised French literature “was the best and continues to be the best. What does the best mean? The most daring, the freest, the one that builds the world from human waste, the one that gives order and clarity to the life of words, the one that dares to break with existing values, the one that insubordinates the present, the one that regulates and administers the dreams of living beings.” “No one has gone further than French writers in the search for the secret entity that feeds life and that is literature, the fictional life that is, for many, the real life.”
Criticism of Putin
The writer, a nationalized Spaniard, asserted that “a life without literature would be horrible, sinister, stripped of the richest and most diverse experiences, an intolerable routine, made of obligations that would be repeated daily as a set of commitments with no promise of remission.” “The novel will save democracy or it will sink with it and disappear,” the author asserted, before making a harsh criticism of Putin. “There will always remain – how can we doubt it? – this caricature that totalitarian countries sell us as novels, but that only exist after having gone through the censorship that mutilates them” as shown by “the example of Vladimir Putin’s Russia”.
“We see how he attacks the unfortunate Ukraine, and how he is greatly surprised when this nation resists, despite its military superiority, its atomic bombs and its massive troops,” he concluded.
Molière’s guardians of the language are named after the motto “To immortality” that appears on the emblem of the institution, created in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu during the reign of Louis XIII and whose mission is to watch over the language French and write a dictionary. In fact, the motto refers to “the immortality of the French language” and to the fact that the number of academics of the language (40 in total) has always been the same since its foundation, even if there are vacancies from time to time. , due to the death of one of them.