Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa. A Retrospective ed. by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó (review)

Mario Vargas Llosa's oeuvre is a benchmark in Latin American and world literature today, one of the main architects of the Latin American Boom. The essays included in Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa are situated around the Peruvian writer's visits to the City College of New York as well as the creation of the Cátedra Vargas Llosa in 2011 (https://catedravargasllosa.org/), one year after he won the Nobel Prize for literature. The City College of New York hosted the first Cátedra Vargas Llosa in the United States in 2013. This is an international academic project honoring the Peruvian writer with two goals: it serves as an interdisciplinary resource for the study of Mr. Vargas Llosa's writings and it promotes the work of Spanish-language writers. Likewise, this retrospective edited by prestigious academics Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó combines unpublished material from the writer as well as from novelists and literary critics who have participated in the Cátedra.

This volume is divided into four parts. The first section presents the voice of the writer: the first two essays "Genesis and Evolution of Captain Pantoja and the Special Services", and "The Return of the Monsters" focus on two different aspects. The first is a talk in which Vargas Llosa recalls the details of the creation of Captain Pantoja, his trips to the Peruvian jungle in the fifties as well as the different stages in building this novel with its technical and thematic experimentation. In the second essay, Vargas Llosa focuses on the social and political problem of the monsters, that is, anti-democratic fundamentalisms such as Nazism, Communism, and Islamic fundamentalism. This analysis, although interesting, reduces the historical process to a simple dichotomy that Vargas Llosa does not delve into and that deserves more pages before proposing a solution of resistance. Finally, this section ends with a conversation between 2015 writer in residence Alonso Cueto and Vargas Llosa, entitled "From Miguel de Cervantes to César Moro," in which the Nobel Prize winner analyzes the importance of Don Quixote in his training as a writer.

The second section "Life and Literature" deals with the critical role of literature in Vargas Llosa's biography. The essay "Discreet and Injudicious Heroes in the Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa" by Efraín Kristal focuses on the depiction of Felicito Yanaqué, main protagonist of the novel The Discreet Hero (El héroe discreto), and contrasts him with the famous characters of Vargas Llosa's fiction (Santiago Zavala, Lieutenant Lituma, Flora Tristán, etc.). Kristal sees in Yanaqué a more conservative character who doesn't defy the status quo as did his previous predecessors, but Kristal fails to explain the reason behind Vargas Llosa's decision to create a character who doesn't feel the need to contest the system. Missing from this analysis are the (neo)liberal ideas that shape Vargas Llosa's recent fiction. "A Life Worthy of a Novel" by J. J. Armas Marcelo, first writer in residence of the Cátedra, presents a review of Vargas Llosa's life connected to his passion for literature. In conversation with the Nobel laureate, Alonso Cueto discusses the relation between Vargas Llosa and the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in "Vargas Llosa and Cervantes: Modern Knights." This fascinating exchange reviews American and Peruvian literature and its influence in Vargas Llosa's fiction.

Three more essays cover the topic "History, Authority and Ideology" in the third section. In "A Poetics of Freedom," Carlos Franz analyzes Vargas Llosa's five political novels in relation to his liberal ideas and his political content. For Franz, the liberal ideas of the Peruvian writer were present from his first novels. Following Karl Popper, he proposes that Vargas Llosa seeks to liberate literature from politics; his characters try to regain control of their lives, of their freedom beyond the chaos of reality. These ideas go...