Mario Vargas Llosa has always wanted to be a writer. Since his childhood, perhaps even before he can read, he knew he would be a writer. When his father appears in his life, he is 10 years old. “Writer, it’s good for drunkards and fags”he said to his son. To bring him the urge, he enrolled him at the Military Academy of Lima.
Painful experience, his passage in this college will form the corpus of The city and dogs (the city and the dogs) which appeared in 1963. Mario Vargas Llosa is 27 years old. He has already written The puppies (puppies) in 1959. With The city and dogshe takes his place in the generation of the boom of South American literature alongside the Argentinian Julio Cortazar, the Mexicans Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes, the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti and the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
A protean work and a devastating feather
It was by landing in Paris, in 1959, that Vargas Llosa measures the importance of being a South American writer. His university studies in Lima allowed him to study Jean-Paul Sartre, of which he feels very close. It is a quote from the philosopher who will appear at the head of The city and dogs : “We play the heroes because we are loose and the saints because we are mean; We play the murderers because we die of desire to kill our neighbor, we play because we are a birth lie. »» With hindsight, this epitaph is pensing …
It was in Paris that he discovers Flaubert. Love at first sight for Madame Bovary. He makes his novelist’s sentence his sentence: “The only way to endure existence is to be tried in literature as in a perpetual orgy. »» Vargas Llosa, bulimic like Balzac, will publish 25 novels, so many essays, a dozen plays and many chronicles in the columns ofThe country.
From his first novel, the prose of Vargas Llosa is wreaking havoc. His heroes are rid of any psychological characteristic and landscapes are surgically portrayed, with flattened primary colors which delimit them as society separates the poor from this bourgeoisie which he honors, thereby denouncing a frozen society, paralyzed by dictatorships which never stop reproducing.
Vargas Llosa builds a protean work, where the narrator plays hide and seek with
