Historia secreta de una novela / The Secret Story of a Novel
Non-fiction , 1971
Tusquets
Pages: 80
In 1966, Mario Vargas Llosa published La casa verde (The Green House), one of the most important and decisive novels of his literary career. Indeed, in addition to its suggestive plot, La casa verde is sustained by a dense plurality of voices, tenses and narrative points of view.
In this book, Historia secreta de una novela, Vargas Llosa reveals what every good reader always wants to know about the authors they admire: how the literary work was conceived, how personal experience is transformed into verbal history, how someone becomes a writer. On these pages, we learn that writing a novel is a sort of “reverse striptease” in which the charms revealed are none other than the “nostalgias, guilt and resentments” the author is dragging around.
This is the unforgettable story of how every authentic storyteller mixes suitable doses of fiction and reality, autobiography and self-invention, and turns his own “green house” into one of those mythical places in the collective imagination.