Mario Vargas Llosa has been elected to the 18th seat of the Académie Française, thereby becoming the first academic to join the ranks of the so-called Immortals without having written a work in French.
This distinction is the latest in a long list of awards and recognitions. Recently his work was included in the prestigious La Pléiade collection of classics, published by Gallimard. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
It is not for nothing that the setting of many of his novels is the moral corruption that overruns a country during a dictatorship: the Peru of General Odría in Conversación en la Catedral, or that of Fujimori in Cinco esquinas; Leónidas Trujillo’s reign of terror in the Dominican Republic in La fiesta del Chivo; and the turbulent Guatemala of the 1950s in Tiempos recios.
Mario Vargas Llosa's narrative has also focused on fascinating historical characters, such as the feminist activist Flora Tristán, the painter Paul Gauguin in El Paraíso en la otra esquina, and the Irish nationalist Roger Casement in El sueño del Celta, who was a key figure in denouncing the abuses of colonialism in the Congo and the Amazon. Vargas Llosa has also been highly praised for his impressive reconstruction of the peasant revolt against the Brazilian army during the Canudos War in La guerra de fin de mundo.
Another strand of his narrative provides a vivid portrait of the Peru he has had to live in. His first novel, La ciudad y los perros, a much talked-about debut that placed him at the epicentre of the Latin American literary boom, focuses on his experiences as a student at a military school. Readers can observe the country's progress and stumbles during the last few decades by following the life of Sergeant Lituma, a recurring character in many of his Peruvian novels, from La casa verde to the recent El héroe discreto.
Apart from the novel genre, he has also written short stories and plays, but above all Mario Vargas Llosa stands out for his facet as an intellectual, with uninterrupted contributions to the press for decades, and as an essay writer, in which culture – and literature in particular – and political thought are the mainstays.
In the Spanish tabloids, his admission to the Académie Française has outshone his recent separation from a famous socialite. Or so we would like to think.
The ceremony will be held on 9 February 2023 and the author will read a speech of thanks.