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Mario Vargas Llosa was shaped by authoritarianism

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  Obituary | A passion for freedom Mario Vargas Llosa was shaped by authoritarianism The Peruvian novelist and liberal died on April 13th, aged 89 Save Share Photograph: Getty Images Apr 15th 2025 | 5 min read Listen to this story H is manners were impeccable. That was the first impression Mario Vargas Llosa made on others. He was polite and cordial, his fluent conversation punctured by the tic of a nervous laugh. Yet, as with many great rationalists, beneath the polished surface lay a man of passion. In his case, it was a passion for freedom—cultural, political and personal. From that came the themes that lay at the heart of many of his novels: the struggle of the individual against dictatorship, and the temptation of utopia, deadly when applied to politics (as it so often was in Latin America). In that field, he was not just an acute observer but also an unsuccessful participant. He discovered politics at the age of 12, when General Manuel Odría overthrew a democratic governmen...
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An Epic for the Ages The Odyssey

  Daisy Dunn An Epic for the Ages The Odyssey By Christopher Nolan (dir) 172 minutes   There is a moment in Chris-topher Nolan’s The Odyssey in which Odysseus (Matt Damon) ponders a mistake. The hero had assumed that the Cyclops was dumb – the giant certainly voiced no review of his meal of Greek soldier with helmet-­crest garnish. It is only when Odysseus leaves his cave that he realises the Cyclops could speak all along. Why hadn’t the monster said anything while they were anxiously plotting in his midst, one of Odysseus’s men asks. ‘Do you talk to ants?’ Odysseus replies. Here is a flash of the man Odysseus was before ten years of war got into his veins. Dry-witted, clever, deceptively self-contained, he was, so Homer defined him, polytropos – a man of myriad ways and unfathomable depths. We see less of the tricksy side of Odysseus’s character in the film; the omission of the famous ‘Nobody’ trick, in which the Greek deceives the Cyclops as to his true identity, will frust...
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Super Mario Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life

  Ian Thomson Super Mario Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life By Gerald Martin Bloomsbury 1,056pp £35   Every time I hear the words ‘magical realism’ I want to reach for my revolver. Back in the 1970s, paperback editions of One Hundred Years of Solitud e by Gabriel García Márquez appeared in student bedsits more predictably than lava lamps and posters of Che Guevara (often with the back cover torn for marijuana spliff filters). Published in 1967, the Colombian saga spawned countless ‘magical’ imitations, not all of them good. Mario Vargas Llosa, the distinguished Peruvian novelist, is associated with the realismo mágico school but, wary of the example set by García Márquez and other Latin American peers (Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar), he wrote novels that were sometimes closer to fictionalised journalism.   Vargas Llosa died in 2025, at the age of eighty-nine. His matinee-idol good looks had long gone. He resembled a ‘waxen dummy’, writes Gerald Martin, and was on the rebound f...
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SN

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  Quà SN của K.  K đưa lại những bài dịch rất mượt từ cuốn Istanbul lên a2a để mừng sinh nhật 90, kèm theo poster chúc SN . Thiệp này chỉ có một cái độc nhất trên đời mà thôi, không recycled được đâu đó nghe . K Thanks. NQT   Sẽ viết một cái gì đó, 1 thứ tự truyện, như đã hứa sau. P HỎNG VẤN DỞM   Phỏng vấn dởm. Phỏng vấn tưởng tượng. Nói chuyện với đầu gối. Tôi gọi tên tôi cho đỡ nhớ [Thanh Tâm Tuyền].  Một Thế Giới Của Riêng Tôi, Nhật Ký Mơ, A World of My Own, A Dream Diary [Graham Greene]. Tôi Nhìn Tôi Trên Vách [Tuý Hồng]. Borges và “Borges”… “Chẳng lẽ Gấu mà không phải là… Gấu ư?”, mỗi một cái tên như thế, là một chút khác biệt. Nhưng có lẽ, tới một lúc nào đó, đây là một cách nhìn lại. Theo kiểu mở ra Cuốn Sách Của Bạn Tôi, của Anatole France . Nhưng muộn màng hơn: Thay vì “ở giữa”, “au milieu du chemin de la vie", thì là “ở cuối đường đời”. Hay mượn câu thơ của chính Gấu: Ngoảnh nhìn lại quãng nửa nhà nửa chợ, Nỗi buồn vạch một nét dài. Thay vì : Hãy...
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