2023-08-10 15:54:38
Does Vargas Llosa allude to Isabel Preysler in the title of his new novel? The question is in the air since it has been known that the new book of the Nobel Prize for Literature is titled ‘I dedicate my silence’. Published by Alfaguara, it will be in bookstores in all Spanish-speaking territories and countries on October 26.
His publishers advance that the Spanish Peruvian writer and academic returns with a novel set in his native Peru “in which he tells the story of a man who dreamed of a country united by music, and went crazy wanting to write a perfect book that would tell it.”
It is the return to the fore of the most prestigious author of current literature in Spanish, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, who in recent months has faced several health crises -with a second admission due to covid- and who at 87 years he rearranged his emotional life after the separation from Isabel Preysler.
Four years after ‘Hard Times’, Vargas Llosa mixes fiction and essay in a work in which the narrator returns to a subject that has obsessed him for years: utopia. But to speak in this case of a cultural utopia with Peruvian music as the nucleus and pretext.
«The waltz, born in the alleys of Lima, integrated Peru. Here I tell that story, and with it I am grateful for a secret love that has accompanied me all my life: the one I feel for Creole music and, especially, for the waltz of my country”, the writer anticipates.
The plot revolves around Toño Azpilcueta, “an expert in Creole music and discoverer of a virtuous guitarist, Lalo Molfino, whose talent seems to confirm all his intuitions: the deep love he feels for Peruvian waltzes, marineras, polkas, and huaynos has a justification.” social” anticipate its editors.
«Perhaps what happens is that criolla music is, in reality, not only a hallmark of an entire country and an expression of that very Peruvian attitude of the huachafería (“Peru’s greatest contribution to universal culture”, according to Toño Azpilcueta), but something much more important: an element capable of provoking a social revolution, of breaking down prejudices and racial barriers to unite the entire country in a fraternal and mestizo embrace”, states the author.
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The novel takes place at the beginning of the 1990s, in a fractured Peru devastated by the violence of Sendero Luminoso in the midst of a terrorist offensive. In this context, “music could be what reminds all those who make up society that, above anything else, they are brothers and compatriots. And in this, it is possible that the virtuosity of Lalo Molfino has a lot to do with it».
Toño Azpilcueta will decide to investigate more about this guitarist, «travel to his place of origin, meet this elusive character, learn about his history, his family and love affairs, how he became such an excellent musician. And he also intends to write a book in which to tell the history of Creole music and develop that idea that the discovery of this extraordinary musician has inoculated in his mind.
Born in Arequipa in 1936, Mario Vargas Llosa’s literary career gained notoriety with ‘La ciudad y los perros’, a novel that won the Biblioteca Breve (1962) and Critics (1963) prizes. Although he had previously released a drama and published a book of stories, ‘The bosses’. In 1965 his second novel appeared, ‘La casa verde’, Critics’ Award and Rómulo Gallegos Award.
He has also published plays — ‘La señorita de Tacna’, ‘Kathie y el hipopótamo’, ‘La Chunga’, ‘El loco de los balcones’, ‘Ojos bonitos, cuadros feos’, ‘A thousand nights and one night’ and The tales of the plague—; studies and essays —’García Márquez: Story of a deicide’, ‘Battle letter for Tirant lo Blanc’, ‘The perpetual orgy’, ‘The archaic utopia’, ‘The truth of lies’, ‘The temptation of the impossible ‘, ‘The journey to fiction’, ‘The civilization of the show’, ‘The call of the tribe’ and ‘The quiet gaze (by Pérez Galdós)’—; memories —’The fish in the water’— and stories —’The puppies’—.
But the bulk of his work and his prestige rest on his novels: ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’, ‘Pantaleon and the visitors’, ‘Aunt Julia and the writer’, ‘The war at the end of the world’, ‘Historia de Mayta ‘, ‘Who killed Palomino Molero?’, ‘The talker’, ‘Praise of the stepmother’, ‘Lituma in the Andes’, ‘Don Rigoberto’s notebooks’, ‘The Fiesta del Chivo’, ‘El Paraíso in the other corner’, ‘Antics of the bad girl’, ‘The dream of the celtic’, ‘The discreet hero’, ‘Five Corners’ and ‘Hard times’
In addition to the Nobel, he has won the most important literary awards, such as the Cervantes, the Príncipe de Asturias, the PEN/Nabokov and the Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Académie Française.
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