The door that closes
Mario Vargas Llosa, once weaving together his memories of the boom era, and recalling the writers who were part of it with him, commented: "It seems that I'm going to have to turn off the light and close the door."
He was the youngest member of that generation that shaped and transformed 20th-century Latin American literature . If we should even call it a generation. The first oddity was that its members weren't necessarily contemporaries, as Julio Cortázar and Vargas Llosa were more than twenty years apart in age.
What truly unites them is the dynamite charge they laid at the foundations of the Latin American novel in a single decade: the 1960s, which is when Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz appeared in 1962; Cortázar's Hopscotch and Vargas Llosa's The City and the Dogs appeared in the same year, 1963; and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared in 1967.
These four novels had a formidable transformative power, and for the first time gave universal scope to a literature that portrayed Latin America outside of the traditional vernacular language, a process of rupture already begun by Juan Rulfo with Pedro Páramo in 1955.
Vargas Llosa was 26 years old when he won the Biblioteca Breve prize from the Seix Barral publishing house in 1962 with The City and the Dogs , a testament to literary precocity through which he transformed his experience as a teenager, a cadet at the Leoncio Prado military school in Lima, into a novel adventure in both structure and language, by fusing time and space, disjointing the stories told in each paragraph, until he put together a puzzle capable of maintaining the tension of the story and giving it the permanent charge of a thriller .
Among its many virtues, just as Hopscotch did for its part, The City and the Dogs taught a new participatory way of reading, making the reader an accomplice in the literary act, however complex it may seem.
I was twenty years old when The City and the Dogs fell into my hands, and from the first time I read it I wanted to take it apart to discover how it was constructed; Vargas Llosa taught procedures at every step, and one could learn from him with less risk of ending up imitating him, as inevitably happened with One Hundred Years of Solitude , where the verbal flow became a river capable of dragging the apprentice between overflowing images and the wonder of exaggerations.
The Green House , published in 1996, opened the perspective of a geographical universe that was also a narrative universe, from the sandbanks of Piura, in the Pacific Northwest of Peru, where a stranger raises the walls of what would become the Green House brothel, to the intricate Amazon jungle, Iquitos, Santa María de Nieva, and its mighty rivers.
Geography of immensities, moors, mountain ranges, jungle, populated by recruited soldiers, pimps, adventurers, missionaries, rubber tappers, prostitutes, smugglers, charlatans, exploiters, recurrent in Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973), El hablador (The Talker) (1983), Lituma en los Andes (1993), and El sueño del celta (The Celt's Dream ) (2010).
It is a world that never ceases to be picaresque; of course, its characters emerge from the popular core, but it reveals to us that this geography is not limited to landscape; and, far from all innocence, it shelters the darkness of the most iniquitous exploitation, such as that carried out by the Arana company in the rubber camps of the Amazon against the indigenous tribes, a genocide evident in the eyes of Roger Casement, the idealist of The Dream of the Celt , and which was already present in the story The Vortex by José Eustacio Rivera, a novel from 1924.
The Green House , his 1969 novel, is populated by journalists, gossip columnists, secret police, cabaret dancers, insurgent students, bars, and brothels under the gray dictatorship of General Odría. Lima the Horrible. His most ambitious, and the one he would call his masterpiece if it weren't in such close competition with his other books, such as The War at the End of the World , from 1981, or The Feast of the Goat , from 2000.
And the chronicler of all Latin America, beyond the national borders of Peru, as evidenced precisely by The War of the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat , along with Hard Times , from 2019.
Endless wars and military dictatorships, enlightened fanatics and tyrants with feathered tricorn hats , corruption and abuse of power, from the Brazilian backlands of the holy man of the Yagunzos, Antonio Conselheiro, to the sinister reign of Generalissimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, to the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, by design of the United Fruit Company and the Dulles brothers, to install an obsequious and mediocre dictator, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas.
With his death, Mario Vargas Llosa has closed the door on the most splendid era of our literature. The light, however, will remain lit.
lanacion
