When Mario Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, Peru, 1936) dazzled everyone with its publication. City and Dogs (1963), green house(1965) and Speech in the Cathedral (1969), novels that form a kind of unit (or trilogy, depending on how you look at it) in terms of personal and literary ambition, because they are all conceived from an immeasurable epic breath, a symphony with a desire for wholeness. The movements depended in no small part on an active reader, for it was clear that diversity, circularity, perspective, fragmentation, verbality and technical mastery determined his role in ensuring the simultaneous development of various voices, various settings, various characters. and it got mixed up a few times, when that happened, I say, it was hard to think that these books could be surpassed. And yet, although the desire to achieve the entire novel did not manifest itself to such an extreme degree in his later books, Vargas Llosa’s fiction writing continued to create texts fixed in a solid and unbreakable imprint, already present in these three unforgettable books. : The desire to represent a reality (often specifically Peru) and to do so artistically, turning his books into completely autonomous elements.
In his latest novels – perhaps more intensely – Heaven in the other corner (2003), bad girl jokes (2006)Celtic Dream (2010) and Five corners (2016) – a greater reflexivity emerges, causing his fiction to veer towards the essayistic; What he is currently delivering is good evidence of that. According to the author’s final note, the novel, which will bid farewell to fiction, is actually a book between fiction and essay. This review tells the story of guitarist Lalo Molfino, who one night dazzled “criolla music scholar” Toño Azpilcueta with his virtuosity: “No, it wasn’t the ability of Chiclayano’s fingers to produce seemingly new notes. It was something else. It was wisdom, it was concentration, it was extreme mastery.” , it was a miracle. And it wasn’t just about the deep silence, it was also about the people’s reaction. The forgotten guitarist’s vision of the “gold and silver of Peru” was similar to Laura’s Petrarchan vision: From that moment on, he put all his strength into the world, while he was still alive, in the 1950s He decided to devote himself to writing a book about the deceased character, about oblivion and Peruvian music, with the intention of making “a posthumous tribute to the guitarist and a contribution to the solution of great national problems”, as if Vargas Llosa wanted to return to the question of the iconic cathedral (“At what point was Peru screwed?”). and tried to unite all their forces in the story of a man who was the emblem of a fractured and destroyed country, scarred by the Shining Path.
To write your book about Molfino Azpilcueta He decides to travel to his birthplace, talk to family and friends who knew him, and investigate how he became such a virtuoso musician. He knew that his book (like Vargas Llosa’s) had to be “built on meticulous research” in order to reunite the country with the hidden hand of music: “When did the country fall into this situation? All broken and broken separating the mountain range from the coast and one brother from another? Peru’ Wasn’t there a need, now more than ever, for a book that would reunite the Peruvian soul? Could you write a book about the Peruvian soul in which each of your fellow citizens could recognize himself and remember what unites them?
With a kind of double self-reference that has been present in Vargas Llosa since Aunt Julia and the Writer (1977), we read the story of a book that is being written and will be read even in Chile. Lalo Molfino and the silent revolution is an article about the guitarist and the history, culture, traditions and politics of Peru. The book’s utopian thesis is that it will not be Marxist forces that will unite the country, but “composers and singers of waltz and marinera” and especially “huachafería”, meaning “fight or tremolina”. Vargas Llosa devotes a truly remarkable chapter to this: the word in question “offers a perspective for observing and organizing the world and culture.”
With his pristine sense of narrative rhythm, impeccable meticulousness in the data and references he deals with and obtained from intense research, his skill in dialogue without photographs, and with the intention of writing a book that accurately displays the double-conditional credits, Vargas Llosa bids farewell to the weapons of Fiction and will dedicate his demons to his beloved Sartre, but Here he leaves an example of how to put together a modest story as a warning to sailors: if you have to make commitments, you have to change the status quo If the wall separating peoples must come down, only culture, represented by music, history and literature, should be at the center of the discussion. Here, as in his other novels, his dissident writings shatter the world as he reads the heroes in chivalric novels do, and he returns to his own rights, attacks, and tells the story of an eternal rebellion against man and the world. .