Article by Luminița Paul – published Monday, April 14, 2025, 7:59 pm / Updated Monday, April 14, 2025 7:59 pm
Mario Vargas Llosa, the prolific and the multi-premier Peruvian writer, has died at 89, leaving a universal inheritance of books, words, sensations, contradictions and wonder. That of the last great novelist in the South American boom.
With the disappearance of Mario Vargas Llosa, a world has closed. The light bulb I read late at night, more than two decades ago, with their eyes as if not to lose a word, conversation at the cathedral. It was not the first, but the one that permanently absorbed me in the large space in which he wrote, lived, created, loved, and caused the Peruvian writer. Later, I cried towards the end of the goat's holiday and revisited London through the eyes and wandering of the reckless girl.
Many have visited this universe. I ask left, right: What do you like more? “First of all, the Miraflores neighborhood, it seems to me an incredible name. The wanderers of the insane girl for the atmosphere and conversation at the Cathedral for weight,” replies colleague Roxana Fleșeru. For Oana Dissănescu, the first is the war of the end of the world, and “the reckless surprised me.” Narcis Drejan began with the holiday of the goat.
I read posts. It appears in the enumeration of the preferences “Aunt Julia and the condeam”, which someone else thought to put in the garbage because it is not worth the library. This is an opinion, we do not live in times of unanimities, on the contrary. Then the city and the dogs, the green house. Lituma in Andes, the story or closer in time the dream of the cel or the discreet hero.
Llosa and access to a different literature
And what do they have to do with the sport, beyond his admiration for the University of Deportes team? Or with the press?
Llosa – curious, we always signal it after the second family name, that of the mother, maybe because Vargas is too common – and what she created meant the chance to explore a different literature in the times when writing, language, how to order an event could still differentiate you in the texts written everyday.
Mario Vargas Llosa in January 2023, in the residence of Madrid Photo: Imago Images
It was not the magic world of Garcia Marquez, but the sad one, pressed by the unusual experiences that marked his adolescence, then funny, then erotic, also politically engaged in a road that wore from left to right over the years in which he lived disappointments and revelations.
“” The lies of literature become truths through us, readers “
“The lies of literature become truths through us, transformed readers, contaminated by desires and, because of fiction, in permanent conflict with mediocre reality.”, The signal in the speech spoken at the acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 2010.
Reading, adds, inoculates to the human spirit the rebellion: “That is why we must continue to dream, read and write, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our perishable condition, to overcome the decline of time and to make the impossible possible.”
In December 2023, two months after he had published his last creation, “I dedicate my silence”, he also separated from the bi -monthly editorials that he has signed since 1990 in El Pais. Samples of an inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and a permanent connection with the actuality. It is, in the end, this is the legacy left to another world, the contemporary one, in constant transformation. Which moves at unimaginable speeds, which ridicule patience and raise the immediate.
As long as we will remember and in (re) discover on Vargas Llosa, we will be richer. Regardless of which field we work or with what team we hold. And maybe if we better screw the lamp light, it will continue to light, as the pure and surprising memory of a discovery.
