It’s a big day for Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Author of a grandiose work, essays, theater and more than twenty novels written in Spanish, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 entered this Thursday, February 9 among the immortals at the French Academy.
Mario Vargas Llosa gave his speech under the dome with his sword and costume embroidered with green and gold olive branches of an academician, as required by the secular tradition of the Parisian institution.
At 86, the novelist is an exception. Eleven years older than the age limit for applying to the French Academy, he is also the first to enter without ever having written a book in French. On the other hand, it is a language that he speaks fluently having immigrated to Paris in 1959, where he feels he exists as a writer.
” I landed here in 1959 and discovered that the French had discovered Latin American literature before me. They were reading Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez… It was therefore thanks to France that I discovered the other face of Latin America, the problems common to all these countries, the horrible heritage of military putsches, underdevelopment, guerrillas, and the dreams of liberation. So it’s in France – what a paradox! – that I started to feel like a Peruvian and Latin American writer. »
“I secretly aspired to be a French writer”
With the entry of the Peruvian-Spanish Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa into the French Academy, the whole of South America joined the prestigious Parisian institution.
In his speech, he also declared his love for French culture and for Paris, the city where he immigrated in 1959. “When I was a child, French culture reigned supreme throughout Latin America and Peru. “Sovereign” means that artists and intellectuals considered it the most original and consistent, seeing in it the consecration of their dreams, this trip to Paris which, from an artistic, literary and sensual point of view, was the capital of the world. And no other city could have challenged him for his crown. It was with these ideas that I grew up and formed myself, reading French authors, among whom Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir saved me from Stalinism which then, under the tutelage of Moscow, dominated the Latin American communist parties. By learning French and reading French authors, I secretly aspired to be a French writer. That’s why I dreamed of France and Paris. »
Mario Vargas Llosa declares his love for French culture and Paris.