Jorge Edwards, one of the last voices of the Latin American ‘boom’, did not achieve the celebrity of Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez or Vargas Llosa. But he has a merit to his credit that none of them could match: with a single book he was able to irritate a left-wing dictator and a right-wing dictator to the point that both prohibited its publication. The book is ‘Persona non grata’ and in it he narrates his brief stay, barely three months, as Chilean ambassador to Cuba, in 1971. It is his best-known work, the one that is always quoted and the one that surely earned him the Cervantes in 1999 although this is strictly the award for an entire career. Edwards, who also had Spanish nationality since 2010, died this Friday in Madrid at the age of 91.
THE KEYS
His career
In addition to being a diplomat, for a time he was also director of a publishing house in SpainCelebrity
Highly appreciated by his colleagues, he never achieved the fame and popular success of the greats of the ‘boom’
The Chilean writer was born in Santiago on June 29, 1931 into a wealthy family. He first studied at the Jesuits in the Chilean capital, where he touched heaven and hell. Heaven because he was a student of a saint in the strictest sense, since his teacher was canonized a few years ago. Hell because, as he admitted when he was already in his 80s, he suffered sexual abuse by another priest. He later studied Law and while still a student he published a collection of short stories. He completed his training at Princeton and began a diplomatic career. The foreign service led him to hold relevant positions in the embassies of Lima, Paris (on several occasions) and Havana.
three months as ambassador
He arrived in the Cuban capital as an ambassador sent by Allende at the height of the ‘Padilla case’. His criticism of the trial-farce to which the poet was subjected -and which divided the authors of the ‘boom’ politically forever- earned him the declaration of ‘persona non grata’ by the Castro government. His brief experience as an ambassador, only three months in office, helped him write a Time.news that would become his most famous book. A work published in 1973, which was banned in Cuba and also in Chile, where Pinochet had installed himself in the La Moneda palace after a coup d’état and led a brutal repression.
Related News
It was precisely this character as a chronicler, over and above his career as a creator of fiction, that the Cervantes jury highlighted when they awarded him the prize. By then, Edwards had worked in Spain as an editor, had returned to diplomacy for a time – he was ambassador to UNESCO – and had been publishing, with some parsimony, a series of works on urban themes. Works that frequently use real characters (there appears Neruda, under whose orders he worked for a time at the Paris Embassy) and that are written with an elegant concise language, quite far from the hyperbole of ‘magical realism’.
The author of ‘El peso de la noche’ and ‘El origen del mundo’, his two most widely read novels, was also a keen columnist who published his texts in various Latin American and Spanish newspapers, including EL CORREO. Despite the fact that throughout his career he won numerous awards and was distinguished as a Knight of the Legion of Honor in France and with the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise in Spain, among many other honors, he never achieved popularity or the majority favor of the readers enjoyed by the great figures of his generation.
Precisely, Cervantes tried to alleviate this lesser recognition. Vargas Llosa said it when announcing the award: “He is a master of biography, a great memorialist and above all a great chronicler, who has been able to give this genre of Time.news an unusual variety.” Some literary values that dictatorships have not appreciated.