El veintiocho de marzo/March 28th
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| Photo from a 1990 interview with Vargas Llosa in The Paris Review, right after he ran for President. Click HERE |
"Escribir es un acto de rebelión contra la realidad." (Writing is an act of rebellion against reality)
Vargas Llosa is a prolific Peruvian writer, journalist, and essayist who also ran for President of Peru in 1990 (he was defeated by Alberto Fujimori). He is considered one of the most important figures of the Latin Boom (other writers include Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes), and he has won numerous literary prizes and honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2010 (hear his advice to young people after winning the prize, HERE). Vargas Llosa was the only child born to middle class parents who separated a month before he was born. His father, who was abusive, was having an affair with a German woman (with whom he had two children). Vargas Llosa spent the majority of his childhood in Cochabamba, Bolivia with his mother and her family. He believed his father was dead. When he was eleven, he returned to Peru and met his father for the first time, who became involved in his life (much to Vargas Llosas' dismay). His father sent him to military school, and that experience became the basis for his first novel in 1963, La ciudad y los perros (published in English as The Time of the Hero). When he was 19, Vargas Llosa married Julia Urquidi, who was ten years older. The couple, who lived in Madrid and Paris, divorced some nine years later, but Vargas Llosas' 1977 novel La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) was based on their relationship. The novel was adapted for the screen in the movie Tune in Tomorrow. In 1965 Vargas Llosa married Patricia Llosa (his first cousin), and the two had three children together. They were together until 2005, when Vargas Llosa entered into a relationship with socialite Isabel Preysler (former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of Enrique Iglesias), much to the delight of gossip magazines. Vargas Llosa, who describes eschewing social media such as Twitter and Facebook in this 2014 interview with Jorge Ramos, still writes regularly and remains an avid reader (the interview ends with Jorge Ramos asking Vargas Llosa about why he punched his friend Gabriel García Márquez in the face in Mexico City in 1976, thus ending their friendship, and Vargas Llosa sticking to his pact with Márquez that he would never tell). Vargas Llosas' work, including his 2000 novel La fiesta del chivo (Feast of the Goat) about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, is some of the most compelling against dictatorships around the world in any form (at first a supporter of Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, he came to abhor the regime for its human rights violations). He has said that "Lo más hermoso de la vida es el amor y la literatura" (Love and literature are the most beautiful things in life). Read more about his life and work in this 2015 story from The New Yorker, HERE.
For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.
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