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Sunday, April 07, 2013

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Nobel Long Overdue

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Nobel Long Overdue / Yoani Sanchez
Posted on April 6, 2013

The literature of Mario Vargas Llosa has prompted several key turning
points in my life. The first was 17 years ago, in a summer of blackouts
and economic crisis. Under the pretext of borrowing "The War of the End
of the World," I approached a journalist expelled from his profession
for ideological problems, with whom I still share my days. I keep that
copy with its yellowed cover and detached pages, because through it
dozens of readers have discovered this Peruvian author censored in the
official bookstores.

Then came university, and while preparing my thesis on the literature of
the dictatorship in Latin America his novel "The Feast of the Goat"
appeared. The inclusion in my analysis of that text about Trujillo did
not sit well with the panel evaluating me. Nor did they like that among
the characteristics of American caudillos, I highlighted exactly those
also flaunted by "our" Maximum Leader. Thus, for the second time, a book
by the now Nobel Prize winner in Literature marked my existence because
it made me realize the frustration of being a philologist in Cuba. Why
do I need a title, I told myself, that announces I am a specialist in
language and words, when I can't even freely unite phrases.

So Vargas Llosa and his literature are responsible, in a direct and
"premeditated" way, for much of what I am today: from my matrimonial
happiness and my aversion to totalitarianism, to my having reneged on
philology and turned to journalism.

I am prepared now, because I fear the next time one of his books falls
into my hands its effect will last another 17 years, or once again slam
the door on a profession.

http://translatingcuba.com/mario-vargas-llosa-a-nobel-long-overdue-yoani-sanchez/

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