Literature – Aunt Thatcher and the priculer: Vargas Losa died

Mario Vargas Losa was one of the most famous Spanish -speaking writers, who called “Spiegel” “the last king of political literature”. Last Sunday the Peruvian-Spanish Nobel Laureate Literature died in Lima at the age of 89. For Monday, the Peruvian government called out state grants. Conservative President Dina Boluarte recognized “his intellectual genius”. Like Vargas Losa, she also came out of her left and switched to the right. The writer, as a young man Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez (about whom he did his doctorate), preached the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher since the 1980s. He also wanted to become President of Peru. In 1990 he was considered a favorite, but then lost Alberto Fujimori, who was even more market -radical than Vargas Losa.

In the Peru of the 1960s, which was economically and socially modernized, Vargas Losa was the literary opponent of José María Arguedas and his indigenousism, in which the figure of the mesticism represented the symbol of social upheavals. Varga Losa, on the other hand, strived for its own literary sphere, in which reality should not be mapped, but should be put together – with artistically linked levels of action, such as in his second novel “The Green House” (1966). This could be called a modernization of the literature, he himself described it as “Novela Total”, as a “total novel”. In the 1970s, his style became lighter and conventional, but also in his world success filmed by Hollywood “Aunt Julia and the artist” (1977) mixed fictional and real narrative methods to accessible and elegant kind.

In this book, a young man who wants to become a writer falls in love with his 14 -year -old aunt, who is interested in anything but in literature. It is considered to be a strongly autobiographically shaped work of Vargas Losa, who himself married his ten -year -old aunt’s second degree in 1955: Julia Urquidi Illanes, who was a writer, however, and published her version of this love story in 1983 as a book under the title “Lo Que Varguitas no Dijo” (which the little Vargas did not say). After the divorce, Vargas Losa married his 19-year-old cousin Patricia in 1965, whom he left in 2015 for Isabel Preysler, ex-wife of the Spanish pop star Julio Iglesias.

In 2010 Vargas Losa, who lived in Europe for a long time, received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki found “not so stupid” at the time. But when Bob Dylan was the first pop musician in 2016, the Vargas Losa appeared as frivolous. “Bob Dylan is a good singer, but he is not a big writer,” he complained. He saw this conservatively, the admirer of Adam Smith, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In 2019 he also wrote his “intellectual autobiography” under the title “The call of the horde”. The hordes are of course the stupid, free after Karl Popper, with which Vargas Losa wanted nothing to do.