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“In a few countries have entrematado as in Guatemala” “Are close to the six —said the dominican,” Mario Vargas Llosa: “In the name of self-defense destroys the democracy”
While working on his novel The green house, Mario Vargas Llosa discovered “something”. “A new possibility”, a technique “able to enter into the reality by many levels”. Tell Wolfgang Luchting, his translator into German, by letter on January 26, 1966. The peruvian writer had lit the light bulb with which he knew how to give way to one of his novels, most important, Conversation in The Cathedral, which marks 50 years of its publication. The experiment, “by perfecting still very much” involved in entreverar conversations of various characters, made at various times, and, at the same time, mix them with the thoughts of them. A bobbin lace of literature that required an effort of the reader. All to tell the country of the dictatorship of Manuel Odriá (1948-1956).
His illusions, thoughts, the difficulties are in the appendix that has been added to an edition, published by Alfaguara, which celebrates half a century of the book that included in its beginning one of the phrases most famous of the Spanish literature: “what is the moment was fucking Peru?”. All this has spoken to you this Thursday, the Nobel peace prize with the journalist of THE COUNTRY Juan Cruz in a crowded courtyard of the Cajasol Foundation in Seville, on the occasion of the XVI Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
“In that Peru, the corruption of the dictatorship reaches areas distant from politics”, he began to Vargas Llosa. Questioned by Cruz, explained that “the main conversation” of the book led to “others who would and would”. When it was clear that, “everything was easier.”
Between the notes refers, as is well known, that Vargas Llosa called the embryo of the book “the novel of the bodyguard,” and that her initial idea was to be 300 pages, but in the end he was able to the passion and came to almost 800. Perhaps because, as he writes to the critic Abelardo Oquendo, wants to “fight without mercy for writing a work quantitatively balzaciana and qualitatively flaubertiana”. Almost happens to the characters you are creating, Zavalita, Ambrose, because in their letters criss-crossing the methodical process of creation (“in the end, I spend six, seven hours before the machine”) and their intimate thoughts (“alone, helpless and without love, I write it terribly these two months,” he says in the absence of his wife, Patricia).
Oquendo gives the account of their sacrifices: “I’ve had to suppress theatres and cinemas and to imprison stone and mud.” In may of 1968, much effort has been worthwhile, as he wrote to his German translator: “I have the certainty of having achieved something really important. My exaltation has no limits”. Just a few months after he confesses that he has written too, that the book suffers from “elephantiasis” and you will have to leave the four volumes in two. “It started a work to remove it, especially adjectives and adverbs,” he said in the conversation with Cross. In an introductory note to this edition, the author confesses that this is the book that most struggled to write. A thought that you picked up this Thursday: “Is the novel that made me a writer.”
For its readers and the scholars call attention to the correspondence with friends, great Latin american writers such as Donoso, García Márquez, Fuentes, who proclaims, after the reading of the book, which is “the only political novel of Latin America”, while Álvaro Mutis conveyed his “glare”. Are “letters of joy to the friends,” recalled Vargas Llosa.
in Addition, there is space for your editor, Carlos Barral, the man who had driven from Barcelona to The city and the dogs, and who, after receiving the evidence says that “it is one of the great novels of the century”. It is the Spain of the Franco dictatorship, so the pages have to pass on the torture of a censor. The special edition reproduces the report of the censorship, of 4 of December 1969, which warns that it is a work in which you talk about politics and that there are expressions “extremely raw”, but just choosing to be discouraged.
And on the editions that had the book, she explains that up until the fourth the title was Conversation in the Cathedral, with the ele of the lowercase. After it became a capital to refer to the infected house meals that the smell of feet mixed with the onion, populated by some characters envilecidos, which were left to go in a society that had been fucked up irreparably.
