His favorite word? “Freedom,” he said one day to Point of view. Mario Vargas Llosa, it was the man-man with the wind soles, banning in his extraordinary life, both physical and mental borders. He was at the same time a Hispano-Peruvian writer, a Spanish Marquis (ennobled by King Juan Carlos), a Swedish Nobel Prize and a French academician. Immortality suits him so well … We must recognize the “scribouillard” (from Tante Julia), at the “Cholo” (“a South American people”) who has just left us “peacefully surrounded by his family in Lima” at the age of 89, an art of a sloppy of tracks.
The author of The city and the dogs or from The party at the goat was also known to be a master in the “romantic bubbling” as for his political fights, his failure with panache in the presidential elections of Peru in 1990, his punch with Gabriel García Márquez or his past love with Isabel Preysler, the ex-wife of Julio Iglesias!
The native of Arequipa in Peru was not a man to dodge the controversy orchestrated by “this show society” which he castigated so much. On the contrary, he did not hide his unwavering loyalty to Juan Carlos considered as “the Honni du Gotha”. “Insofar as we consider that kings can have friends, so I am one,” he said of the Spanish monarch who gave him “Don Mario”. The king, accompanied by his daughter the Infanta Cristina, will also be present in 2023 during the installation of the Neoaristocrat Quai de Conti. Taking place on the 18 chair, Mario Vargas Llosa succeeded the brilliant philosopher Michel Serres.
The one who was the third stranger to enter the academy after the American Julien Green and Canada-Haitian Dany Laferrière, but also in 2016, the first foreign author to be published in La Pléiade during his lifetime, recognized a debt to France: “It was in Paris that I really became a writer. It was here that I wrote my first novels. France brought me the idea of universalism and critical mind. With an infinite tenderness, he did not forget his first Parisian trades, before taking the pen and entering as a journalist on French radio-television: he made newspaper pickup, became a hard at Les Halles, worked at Berlitz…
In his discourse of thanks, under the dome, he had passionately scared his pantheon of French authors: Victor Hugo and “his Jean Valjean, unforgettable companion”, Dumas “who rethinks what others have thought” and whose musketeers have been the “deadly enemies of Cardinal de Richelieu, our founder”. And above all “his master” Gustave Flaubert, Accepted at the Academy! Madame Bovarywhich he bought, in 1959, in the Latin district. The name of the bookstore? The joy of reading.
Read also >> Juan Carlos to Mario Vargas Llosa: “You deserve it and more”
