Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the greatest prose writers of the 20th century

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author naturalised as a Spaniard, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2010 and member of the Académie française (he was born in Arequipa on 28 March 1936) was able to skilfully combine novel-writing with valuable journalistic pieces and insightful essays and will be remembered as one of the greatest Latin American prose writers of the 20th century.

The Swedish Academy decorated him, not surprisingly, 'for his cartography of power structures and sharp images of resistance, revolt and the defeat of the individual'.

Barely 16 years old, Vargas Llosa had distinguished himself with a play, The Inca's Escape (1952), which can be considered his first real literary effort, already dense with political allusions (in particular, in reference to Manuel Odría's dictatorship). His debut novel arrived in '63 with The City and the Dogs (translated into Italian by Feltrinelli in '67 and now available from Einaudi), which recounts the fierce discipline of the Leoncio Prado military school. This is followed by La Casa Verde (1966) and, above all, Conversation in the 'Catedral' (1969), a work that still refers to Odría's authoritarianism and places Vargas Llosa solidly on the left: the stories of the journalist Santiago Zavala and the zambo Ambrosio intertwine in the shady bar 'La Catedral', named after the shape of its entrance door. The incipit of the text is simply dazzling: 'From the door of "La Crónica" Santiago gazes at the avenida Tacna, loveless: cars, unequal and discoloured buildings, skeletons of bright advertisements swaying in the haze, the grey midday.

At what point did Peru get screwed? The yellers, threading their way among the vehicles stopped at the traffic lights on Calle Wilson, shouted out the headlines of the afternoon's newspapers, and he began to walk, slowly, towards the Colmena' (translation by Enrico Cicogna, Einaudi). One of the most clamorous anecdotes in the history of Spanish-American literature dates back to 1976: in Mexico City, probably for private reasons (but the real reason never came to light), the Peruvian writer unleashed a well-aimed punch at his friend Gabriel García Márquez. Result: the Colombian had himself portrayed by photographer Rodrigo Moya smiling and with a black eye. However, the blow to Márquez has something symbolic in political terms: Vargas Llosa effectively leaves the anti-capitalist left and reaches liberal positions.

In the meantime, his literary activity continues: from The War at the End of the World (1981) to The Wandering Narrator (1987), from The Adventures of the Bad Girl (2006) to the very recent I Dedicate You My Silence (2023), Vargas Llosa always mixes a melancholic inclination and an unabated hope with admirable formal balance. A polygraph extraordinaire, the Peruvian author - as mentioned above - has also published short stories, children's texts, memoirs and essays (notably The Civilisation of the Spectacle, 2012, and The Call of the Tribe, 2018).