Interesting Times: i.m. Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025)

Mario Vargas Llosa: Tiempos recios (2019)

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa
1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa
(28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025)

I have books that deserve to outlive me, yes. Conversation in the Cathedral and The War of the End of the World. I worked very hard on those two books. But I don’t think about death.

- Mario Vargas Llosa (20/2/2023)

Of course, the title of the penultimate novel published by Mario Vargas Llosa in his lifetime, Tiempos recios, doesn't really mean "interesting times." The translator of the English version, Adrian Nathan West, called it Harsh Times - and he might have chosen "rough", tough", or even "hard" times if he'd wanted to.

Charles Dickens: Tiempos difíciles. Trans. José Luis López Muñoz (2010)

Charles Dickens's 1854 novel Hard Times is generally rendered in Spanish as Tiempos difíciles, so it's not clear whether or not Vargas Llosa was actually intending any allusion to it.

What I had in mind in choosing a title for my post was that ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times" - though unfortunately Wikipedia, with its usual thoroughness, has informed us that there's no known local source for this piece of nineteenth-century Chinoiserie:

The nearest related Chinese expression translates as "Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos" ... The expression originates from ... the 1627 short story collection by Feng Menglong, Stories to Awaken the World.

Certainly Mario Vargas Llosa, the immensely distinguished, Nobel prize-winning Peruvian writer who died earlier this year, had no choice about living in interesting times.

I saw him once in person. He was billed to give the 1986 Neil Gunn International Fellowship lecture at Edinburgh University, where I was studying at the time. My plan was to write a Doctoral thesis on European versions of "South American-ness" along the lines of Edward Said's then newly minted text Orientalism (1978), so you can imagine that the chance to see one of the greatest living Latin American writers in action was far too important to miss.

It was - as always - a brilliant performance. His English, albeit a little accented, was fluent, and he had little difficulty in holding the attention of the far-from-polyglot audience. The talk itself appeared shortly afterwards, in slightly truncated form, in an issue of the Times Literary Supplement, and subsequently, in full, in John King's 1987 book Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey. Then I found it again as chapter two of his 1990 book A Writer's Reality, based on a series of lectures given in 1988 at Syracuse University, New York.

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Writer's Reality (1990)

I mention these details to emphasise just how adept he was in making the most of each piece of work he completed. What had seemed like a spontaneous response to the question of the Chronicles of Peru and their influence on subsequent fiction in Latin America was clearly a well-worn theme for Vargas Llosa, and he was keen to make the most of it by recycling it again and again.

At the time he was considered somewhat suspect in Britain for his open support of Margaret Thatcher. He adapted a good deal of her social attitudes and political rhetoric to local conditions in his campaign for President of Peru in 1990. Defeated by Alberto Fujimori, Vargas Llosa claimed that he'd only run in the first place because his country's "fragile democracy was on the point of collapse."

Subsequent events could be said to have proved him right, though, since Fujimori "carried out a self-coup against the Peruvian legislature and judiciary" early in his Presidential term:

Fujimori dissolved the Peruvian congress and supreme court, effectively making him a de facto dictator of Peru.

Fujimori went on to draw up a new constitution, and was re-elected twice under its provisions in 1995 and 2000. However, his time in office:

was marked by severe authoritarian measures, excessive use of propaganda, entrenched political corruption, multiple cases of extrajudicial killings, and human rights violations ... Fujimori targeted members of Peru's indigenous community and subjected them to forced sterilizations.

Interesting times, as I mentioned above.

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El Pais: Mario Vargas Llosa at his home in Madrid (2023)

An internationally celebrated writer such as Vargas Llosa could have been forgiven for retreating from the world of action and confining himself to his books after such a set-back as being trounced in the election. And he did live mainly in Madrid after 1990, though he "spent roughly three months of the year in Peru with his extended family."

The Latin-American idea of the writer as "tribuno" - tribune of the people - was strong in him, though. He'd already explored the world of mass media in a South Bank Show-style talk show called The Tower of Babel, produced for Peruvian TV in the early 1980s. Theatre, public lectures, visiting professorships, were all important parts of his life, as well as his complex engagement with the tragic history of his native land.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La guerra del fin del mundo (1981)

My own first attempt at an assessment of Vargas Llosa's work came in chapter 3 of the thesis I mentioned above, which eventually ended up with the imposing title "An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day." I focussed on his sixth novel La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World], comparing it to two previous accounts of the Canudos Campaign, a bizarre late nineteenth-century conflict between "civilisation" (in the form of the Brazilian government) and "backwardness" (in the form of an obscure millenarian religious sect) in the sertão, the primitive north-eastern backlands of Brazil.

Euclides da Cunha: Os Sertões (1902)

The first account, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões [Rebellion in the Backlands], is a kind of sociologically infused history of the confused mentality of the Conselheiristas - as the followers of the home-grown prophet Antonio Conselheiro had come to be called. It's a Brazilian classic, and a major work of world literature.

R. B. Cunninghame Graham: A Brazilian Mystic (1920)

The second, R. B. Cunninghame Graham's A Brazilian Mystic: Being the Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro, is a more conventional history of the event, interesting mainly for the personality of its author, a Scottish writer and traveller - mainly in Latin America - who was also among the founders of both the Scottish Labour Party (1888) and the Scottish Nationalist Party (1928).

John Lavery: Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936)

The Canudos campaign meant very different things to these three writers: the Brazilian journalist, the Scottish historian and travel writer, and the Peruvian novelist. But it meant different things in their three separate eras, too. Da Cunha, in the late nineteenth century, felt despair at the seemingly bottomless ignorance and backwardness of his provincial countrymen; Cunninghame Graham, in the 1920s, saw it as yet another example of colonial oppression and indiscriminate violence; and as for Vargas Llosa in the early 1980s ... what exactly did he think about it?

None of his previous novels had strayed far from Peru - not only that, but the Peru of the 1950s, of his early manhood, as perfect a mirror for his larger thoughts about men and the world they inhabit (or so it seemed at the time) as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County had been for the elegist of the American South.

It's interesting to revisit the rather convoluted way in which I tried to approach this question in my own thesis in the late 1980s:

Mario Vargas Llosa's book La guerra del fin del mundo ... has many endings – to match its many narrative streams – and these are perhaps better dealt with in summary than in quotation. The actual ending comes as the culmination of an argument between a local Bahían Colonel and the gaucho lieutenant Maranhão who has been acting as unofficial executioner (by decapitation) of the prisoners. After the Colonel has humiliated the lieutenant by slapping his face and urinating on him, one of the woman prisoners (who has observed this act of revenge) catches hold of him and gives him the answer to the question he has been asking: where is João Abade, the military commander of the rebels?

"He got away, then?"
The little old woman shakes her head again. encircled by the eyes of the women prisoners.
"Archangels took him up to heaven," she says, clacking her tongue. "I saw them."

One could see this as Vargas Llosa's determination not to end in despair, but rather with a sense of victory of some sort – however equivocal. The main characters of the novel have already been dealt with, in the fashion of a nineteenth-century novel: the 'nearsighted journalist' (who one feels is some kind of analogue ... to Euclides da Cunha, one of the dedicatees of Vargas Llosa's book) has found happiness with Jurema, whom he met in Canudos; 'Galileo Gall', the Scottish revolutionary and phrenologist (... perhaps ... suggested in part by R. B, Cunninghame Graham) has died precisely because of his abuse of love, with the 'fateful femininity’ Jurema; and, finally, the Baron de Canabrava, the éminence grise of Bahían politics, has succeeded in making love again, thus restoring his wife and himself to the spiritual harmony they had lost in the siege. It sounds a wild farrago, but it all builds up to the single unified (avowedly authorial) conclusion to be drawn from the tale. As he himself has said, this is something new in his work:

Because of the type of problem faced by the various characters. I have had to think in terms of generalized concepts – something which I have never done before while writing a novel, because it is a kind of thinking which tends to create obstacles, a novel being (for me, at any rate) a fundamentally concrete world of experience.

What this conclusion is defies simple expression – but it seems, essentially, to set against the 'world-historical' cataclysm of Canudos the human values and human scale of the lives and mutual affections of the various characters. In essence, then, it is an attempt to draw from the particularities of the Canudos campaign 'ciertas ideas generales' [certain general ideas].

Or, as he puts it elsewhere:

"Don't you see?" the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. "Canudos isn't a story: it's a tree of stories."

Mario Vargas Llosa: The War of the End of the World (1981 / 1984)

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Mario Vargas Llosa (1988)

Fictions

One of the mnemonic devices I've evolved over the years for turning off the tap of the monologue in my head when I'm trying to get to sleep is to recite lists of tricky - but memorisable - phenomena. It started off with the reigns of the kings and queens of England, then moved on to the chronology of the American presidents. When I got bored with those, I switched to the dates of Charles Dicken's novels - then ditto for Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and ... Mario Vargas Llosa.

Vargas Llosa's 21 works of fiction seem to fall naturally into threes - or at any rate that's the easiest way for me to remember them when I'm lying awake at night.

Books I own are marked in bold:

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Mario Vargas Llosa: La ciudad y los perros (1962)



1. La ciudad y los perros [The City and the Dogs] (1962)
   • La ciudad y los perros. 1962. Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1988.
   • The Time of the Hero. 1962. Trans. Lysander Kemp. 1966. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La Casa Verde (1965)



2. La casa verde [The Green House] (1965)
   • La casa verde. 1965. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1983.
   • The Green House. 1965. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1968. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Conversación en La Catedral (1969)



3. Conversación en la Catedral [Conversation in the Cathedral] (1969)
   • Conversación en La Catedral. 1969. Nueva Narrativa Hispánica. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1979.
   • Conversation in the Cathedral. 1969. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1975. London: Faber, 1993.

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These first three novels definitely form a group. In a previous post on the "Boom" generation of Latin American novelists, I said of them:

Vargas Llosa's first three novels are fantastically dense, almost Faulknerian studies of the lifestyles - and moral compromises - of Peruvian society and politics in the 1950s. They're linguistically inventive, stylistically innovative, and powerfully structured. La ciudad y los perros makes a kind of parable out of the author's own schooldays in Lima. La casa verde - probably the most enduring of the three - centres on the doings in a certain brothel in Amazonia; whereas Conversación en la Catedral records a single conversation in a bar, with an almost infinite set of ramifications branching out from each line of dialogue.

Together, they probably form his major claim on posterity.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973)



4. Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Pantaleón and the Special Service] (1973)
   • Pantaleón y las visitadoras. 1973. Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1989.
   • Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. 1973. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1978. London: Faber, 1987.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977)



5. La tía Julia y el escribidor [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter] (1977)
   • La tía Julia y el escribidor. 1977. Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1986.
   • Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. 1977. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1982. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La guerra del fin del mundo (1981)



6. La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World] (1981)
   • La guerra del fin del mundo. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1981.
   • The War of the End of the World. 1981. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1984. London: Faber, 1986.

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In his 1990 Paris Review interview, Vargas Llosa said:

I used to be “allergic” to humor because I thought, very naively, that serious literature never smiled; that humor could be very dangerous if I wanted to broach serious social, political, or cultural problems in my novels. I thought it would make my stories seem superficial and give my reader the impression that they were nothing more than light entertainment ... But one day, I discovered that in order to effect a certain experience of life in literature, humor could be a very precious tool. That happened with Pantaleon and the Special Service. From then on, I was very conscious of humor as a great treasure, a basic element of life and therefore of literature.

It wasn't just humour that he discovered at the beginning of the 1970s, though, it was the whole burgeoning world of postmodern intertextuality. His next three novels are still among his most beloved and widely read. As I said of them in an earlier post:

No more ponderous studies of colonial corruption and violence - instead, he decided to approach these themes through humour and linguistic absurdity. Pantaleón y las visitadoras, the first of these novels, tells the story of a "special service" of prostitutes provided to servicemen in Amazonia, poorly concealed under a cloak of bureaucratic verbiage and officialese. It's a very funny novel, which reprises the themes of La casa verde in a completely different way.
He followed it up with an even bolder leap into the unknown: La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977) retold the events of his own early life, with the admixture of an imaginary hack serial-writer, whose multiple stories were all starting to fold in on each other in an increasingly chaotic blizzard of clichés. This remains his most famous and successful novel, having even survived a dreadfully cack-handed Hollywood adaptation with Barbara Hershey and Peter Falk. It revisits not only the world of his first novel The Time of the Hero, but also that of the early stories collected in Los jefes & los cachorros [The Cubs] (1959 / 1967).

I've already commented above on the equally multi-layered War of the End of the World.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Historia de Mayta (1984)



7. Historia de Mayta [The Story of Mayta] (1984)
   • The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. 1984. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1986. London: Faber, 1987.

Mario Vargas Llosa: ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986)



8. ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? [Who Killed Palomino Molero?] (1986)
   • ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? 1986. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1988.
   • Who Killed Palomino Molero? 1986. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1987. London: Faber, 1989.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El hablador (1987)



9. El hablador [The Storyteller] (1987)
   • El hablador. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1987.
   • The Storyteller. 1987. Trans. Helen Lane. 1989. London: Faber, 1990.

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The next period of Vargas Llosa's writing life is rather more difficult to characterise:

There were political satires, such as Historia de Mayta [The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta] (1984) and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto [The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto] (1997). There were detective novels, such as ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? [Who Killed Palomino Molero?] (1986) and its sequel Lituma en los Andes [Death in the Andes] (1993). There were risqué sex comedies, such as Elogio de la madrastra [In Praise of the Stepmother] (1988), and Travesuras de la niña mala [The Bad Girl] (2006).

Of the three novels listed directly above, my own pick would definitely be El hablador, though I described it as "more of a great idea for a novel than a great novel" in my earlier post.

Interestingly enough, much the same approach, interspersing Indian folktales with the contemporary story of despoliation of the Amazon, was taken by British playwright Christopher Hampton in his at-least-equally-accomplished 1970s play Savages.

¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? is a good roman policier, but not really much more than that. The Historia de Mayta suffers from too much topical satire at the expense of hopeless left-wing ideologues. The events it was based on were real enough, but somehow Vargas Llosa hasn't added anything very substantial to them. Perhaps he was just stretched too thin at this point in his life to concentrate fully on his vocation as a novelist.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Elogio de la madrastra (1988)



10. Elogio de la madrastra [In Praise of the Stepmother] (1988)
    • Elogio de la madrastra. La sonrisa vertical: Colección de Erotica dirigada por Luis G. Berlanga. Barcelona: Tusquet Editores, S. A., 1988.
    • In Praise of the Stepmother. 1988. Trans. Helen Lane. 1990. London: Faber, 1992.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Lituma en los Andes (1993)



11. Lituma en los Andes [Lituma in the Andes] (1993)
    • Death in the Andes. 1993. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1996. London: Faber, 1997.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (1997)



12. Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto [The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto] (1997)
    • The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. 1997. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1998. London: Faber, 1999.

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I described the two novels In Praise of the Stepmother and its sequel The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto as "quasi-soft porn" in an earlier post on Vargas Llosa's later work.

Certainly it was a surprising development in the work of one of the most senior writers in the Latin American canon. Opinions differ on the effectiveness of the result. What might have seen as par for the course in a comparably eminent French writer somehow seemed to shock people more when it came from so "serious" an author.

Lituma en los Andes is a grim detective novel, a sequel to ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, but with far more heft and atmosphere. It provides another fascinating window into the strange world of Vargas Llosa's Peru.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: La Fiesta del Chivo (2000)



13. La fiesta del chivo [The Feast of the Goat] (2000)
    • The Feast of the Goat. 2000. Trans. Edith Grossman. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003)



14. El paraíso en la otra esquina [Paradise in the other corner] (2003)
    • The Way to Paradise. 2003. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Faber, 2004.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Travesuras de la niña mala (2006)



15. Travesuras de la niña mala [Doings of the Bad Girl] (2006)
    • The Bad Girl: A Novel. 2006. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

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"The Feast of the Goat came after such a long dry spell that most critics had already written him off," is how I put it in a previous post called "Novelists in their 80s."

The Way to Paradise (like its successor The Dream of the Celt) is an interesting enough ficto-biography. Travesuras de la niña mala is - we're told - Vargas Llosa's attempt to transpose his most-admired novel, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, to the world of contemporary Peru. Neither of the last two is much more than a footnote to his earlier triumphs, however.

But The Feast of the Goat! I couldn't really believe it when I first read it. I described it then as:

a terrifyingly visceral piece of work, fully comparable to such early works as La casa verde or Conversación en la Catedral. More to the point, it's a major contribution to that strange literary subgenre called the Latin American dictator novel.

If you'd like to see more examples of these novels, I've already tried to list most of the major titles - from Asturias' El Señor Presidente to Roa Bastos' I the Supreme and García Márquez' Autumn of the Patriarch - in a previous post.

There's not a lot of point in writing more about La fiesta del chivo: it demands to be read. I don't think anyone had anticipated that the old man still had it in him.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: El sueño del celta (2010)



16. El sueño del celta [The Dream of the Celt] (2010)
    • El sueño del celta. 2010. Alfaguara. México: Santillana Ediciones Generales, S. A., 2010.
    • The Dream of the Celt. 2010. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2012.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El héroe discreto (2013)



17. El héroe discreto [The Discreet Hero] (2013)
    • The Discreet Hero. 2013. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2015.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Cinco esquinas (2016)



18. Cinco esquinas [Five Corners] (2016)
    • The Neighbourhood. 2016. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2018.

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In an earlier post, quoted above, I tried to sum up the effect of one of Vargas Llosa's later novels:

The Discreet Hero is not among his masterworks ... but it's still a fascinating read for the fans.
Those of you who've read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter will recall how the latter's scripts start to fold in on themselves, with characters appearing in the wrong contexts and contaminating the plotlines with unexpected interventions. So many of Vargas Llosa's own old characters - Lituma, Don Rigoberto, the 'Stepmother' herself - turn up in this novel that one has, at times, the odd feeling that the whole thing is set in Vargas-Llosa-land rather than any kind of recognisable Peru.
His obsession with the provincial Peru of the 1950s, its constant recurrence in its work, is supplanted here by an rather more 'contemporary' Lima and Piura. The characters all seem to live in the past, however: his past, Vargas Llosa's, rather more than their own.
The novel is neatly plotted and full of unexpected treats - though perhaps more for readers familiar with his work than any newcomers. The playfulness may seem a little forced at times, the virtuosity a bit tired, but there's no doubt that Vargas Llosa at his worst ... is still superior to most other novelists at their best.

The Dream of the Celt, as I mentioned above, is a ficto-biography of the Irish social activist and revolutionary Roger Casement. It makes a rather unhappy attempt to write off Casement's notorious "Black Diaries", detailing his homosexual activities, as a series of fantasies rather than a factual record, but is otherwise quite persuasive in its reconstruction of his world: particularly his investigations of the appallingly brutal turn-of-the-century rubber plantations of the Amazon.

Cinco esquinas, too, met with a rather mixed press. Reviewers' opinions ranged from: "a colorful but confusing and ultimately disappointing work by a great writer" to an "audacious and skillful" novel which "pulses along with a zest and cunning not commonly found among octogenarian Nobel laureates."

The translation, too, has received brickbats as well as bouquets, being described on the one hand as "punchily translated by the ever-excellent Edith Grossman", and on the other blamed for "tripping up" the reading experience.

As the saying goes: You pays your money and you takes your choice.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Tiempos recios (2019)



19. Tiempos recios [Harsh Times] (2019)
    • Harsh Times. 2019. Trans. Adrian Nathan West. London: Faber, 2021.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Le dedico mi silencio (2023)



20. Le dedico mi silencio [I dedicate my silence to you] (2023)
    • Le dedico mi silencio. Alfaguara. USA: penguinlibros, 2023.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Los jefes / Los cachorros (1959 / 1967)



21. Los jefes (1959) / Los cachorros [The bosses / The cubs] (1967)
    • Los jefes / Los cachorros. 1959 & 1967. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1988.
    • The Cubs and Other Stories. 1965 & 1967. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1979. London: Faber, 1991.

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I've added Vargas Llosa's two early collections of short stories to the end of this list as a kind of coda to his 65 years of publishing fiction. Los jefes - winner of his first literary award, the Leopoldo Alas Prize - and the novella Los cachorros both inhabit the world of Peru's feral street kids. He may have ended up as one of the grand old men of world letters, but he began as a young punk, and he was anxious not to let anyone forget it.

Peru in that decade, the 1950s, when he was in his teens, remained his spiritual centre for the rest of his life. Some of his greatest novels - The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat - were set elsewhere in Latin America, but an overwhelming number of them were situated right there at home, in the narrow streets and broad mountains he'd known since childhood.

His last, Le dedico mi silencio [I gift you my silence], not yet translated into English, is no exception: it is, by all accounts, a "love letter to Peruvian popular music." As the TLS reviewer said at the time:

If this novel proves to be Vargas Llosa’s swan song, then it is hard to imagine a better one. It deploys a subtle, self-deprecating humour, as though nothing about it were really serious, when much clearly is. Toño is especially dedicated to the Peruvian vals, or waltz, a dance that bears little resemblance to its Viennese namesake and which (he tells us) emerged spontaneously from Lima’s sordid alleyways. Nobody invented the vals, everybody loves it, and it has the potential, or so Toño believes, to bring Peruvians together at a time when the country is being torn apart by Shining Path guerrillas.

Well, Mario Vargas Llosa is dead now, and with him dies the last link to that miraculous "Boom" generation. Their achievements are part of literary history now; their complex, at times contradictory, political stands have not resulted in the liberation from foreign domination they sought. They did, however, succeed in reverse-colonising the literature of the nations who had most oppressed them: surely a worthy enough feat for any set of writers?

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Jorge Luis Borges with Mario Vargas Llosa

When Vargas Llosa was asked, in the 1990 Paris Review interview I quoted from above, whom he most admired among his contemporaries, the answer was simple: Jorge Luis Borges.

... if I were forced to choose one name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one. Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion. Our great writers have all been prolix ... Borges is the opposite — all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.

The admiration was not mutual, however:

The last time I saw him was at his house in Buenos Aires; I interviewed him for a television show I had in Peru and I got the impression he resented some of the questions I asked him. Strangely, he got mad because, after the interview — during which, of course, I was extremely attentive, not only because of the admiration I felt for him but also because of the great affection I had for the charming and fragile man that he was — I said I was surprised by the modesty of his house, which had peeling walls and leaks in the roof. This apparently deeply offended him. I saw him once more after that and he was extremely distant ... The only thing that might have hurt him is what I have just related, because otherwise I have never done anything but praise him. I don’t think he read my books. According to him, he never read a single living writer after he turned forty, just read and reread the same books ... But he’s a writer I very much admire.

"I don't think he read my books." It doesn't matter how great your fame and achievements may be, there's always something missing. Borges didn't read Vargas Llosa - or at least claimed not to - so he never knew just how he would have stacked up in that extraordinary blind genius's world.

Pepe Fernandez: Jorge Luis Borges (Hotel L'Hôtel, 1978)

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Municipalidad Provincial de Talara: Mario Vargas Llosa (13 April 2025)

Nos unimos al dolor de todos los peruanos y expresamos nuestro sentido pesar por el fallecimiento de Mario Vargas Llosa, Premio Nobel de Literatura.

Mario Vargas Llosa deja una huella imborrable en el mundo de la literatura, y como peruanos, nos enorgullece que sea uno de los principales referentes para los novelistas del Perú y el mundo.

Descansa en paz, Mario Vargas Llosa.

We join in the grief of all Peruvians and express our deepest condolences for the passing of Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize winner in Literature.

Mario Vargas Llosa left an indelible mark on the world of literature, and as Peruvians, we are proud that he is one of the leading examples for novelists in Peru and around the world.

Rest in peace, Mario Vargas Llosa.

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Yoknapatawpha Blues

Faulkner in the University

I guess that's a bit of a test, actually. What do the words "Yoknapatawpha County" mean to you? If the answer is not a lot, I suspect you're not alone.

What they should mean, of course, is ground zero for William Faulkner's fictional universe of decaying Southern Colonels and pushy rednecks in the fever-drenched woods and swamps of Old Dixie.

I've just finished reading Joseph Blotner's immense, two-volume life of Faulkner, which seems at times to aspire to chronicle every day of his life in full detail.

Joseph Blotner: Faulkner: A Biography (1974)

Blotner does his best to soften Faulkner's reputation as a hopeless drunk and ne'er-do-well ("Count No 'Count," as some of the locals used to call him), and points out the immense industry and craftsmanship that enabled him to churn out 19 novels, 2 poetry collections, 5 story collections, and 125-odd short stories in forty years of writing.

Nevertheless, Faulkner was definitely a bit of a wild card - prone to sitting for hours in complete silence, suspicious of strangers to an almost paranoid degree, and generally "not a tame lion" (as people keep on remarking of Aslan in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books).

Blotner, vol. I: flyleaf
[photos: Bronwyn Lloyd]

My own copy of Blotner, bought second-hand sometime in the 1980s, is clean and unannotated apart from a few interesting inscriptions on the fly-leaf. I thought I might share these with you in the hope of further elucidation of just what "P. L. Nairn [?: Nairne? Napier?]" may have meant by them.

Blotner, vol. I: halftitle

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money"
- Samuel Johnson

That one seems pretty self-explanatory. One constant theme in Faulkner's letters and daily life is the endless need for money. Selling short stories, selling movie scripts, selling anything that moved in order to maintain his beleaguered Southern Mansion Rowan Oak is a constant theme. This tails off a bit after the award of the Nobel Prize (most of which he actually ended up putting in trust to help other writers: particularly African American ones - which goes some way to giving the lie to his alleged racism), but by then the royalties on his books had begun to grow more substantial, in any case.

Blotner, vol. I: back of halftitle

What interests me most about this motto, however, is the fact that it's written on a separate piece of paper which has been pasted in over another inscription. One can just dimly make it out if the page is held up to the light:

To be read at Twilight ...
- The Faulknerian time of day.

Blotner, vol. I: back flyleaf

It's not till he gets to the back of the book that he really lets himself go, however:

"Six Years with the Texas Rangers" J. B. Gillett

Towards the end of 1925, Faulkner's friend Phil Stone lent him a number of books (listed on p.489 of Blotner's biography): "As a change of diet from poetry, perhaps, he lent his friend James B. Gillett's Six Years with the Texas Rangers." Interesting? Not to me. It clearly was to P. L. Nairne, however.

Eccentricity [?] of Faulkner's writing "The Sound & The Fury"

Roughly 35 pages (pp. 564-98) of Blotner's biography are devoted to the ins and outs of composing The Sound and the Fury, universally agreed to be Faulkner's most dizzyingly experimental piece of work, and regarded by most (myself included) as his masterpiece. Perhaps this is a reference to that strange ordeal.

p. 675: "son of a shopgirl and [a] syphilitic strike-breaker, grandson of a pyromaniac, he was stunted in childhood, impotent and deformed in adulthood. He died on [a] gallows, ironically, for a murder he did not commit."

This is a quotation from Blotner's summing-up of the character Popeye in Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary. While perfectly accurate in context, it does sound a little bizarre taken by itself.

"Dostoevsky's shadow in the deep south"

This is the title of one of the reviews of Sanctuary, mentioned on p. 685 of Blotner, along with the following quote from Henry Seidel Canby's article about the book in the Saturday Review of Literature:

"I have chosen Mr. Faulkner as a prime example of American sadism: H. S. Canby [SANCTUARY]

And so we come to:

"I was born in 1826 of a negro slave and an alligator - both named Gladys Rock."

This is a straight quote from an interview Faukner gave to a reporter called Marshall J. Smith in 1931 (Blotner, 694). He went on: "I have two brothers. One is Dr. Walter E. Traprock and the other is Eaglerock - an airplane." Walter E. Traprock, as it turns out, is the pseudonym under which George Shepard Chappell published a series of parody travel books: The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas (1921), My Northern Exposure: the Kawa at the Pole (1922), and Sarah of the Sahara: a Romance of Nomads Land (1923) among them. Faulkner was in fact the eldest of three brothers. The youngest, Dean Swift Falkner (the "u" came later), was killed in an airplane crash in 1935. His eldest brother Bill had bought him the plane, as well as teaching him to fly it. Connections! Connections everywhere, from what I can see.

Twilight: The Faulknerian time of the day.
- A miscegenation of Day and night.

This appears to be another version of the obscured quotation at the front of the book, tidied up a little and with the addition of the "miscegenation of day and night" conceit. I'm not sure that it's a particularly happy one.

Interestingly enough, it's the Dostoevsky quote, above, which seems to lead in the most promising directions, witness the following passage on p.716 of Blotner's first volume:

When the [student] reporter [from College Topics, at the University of Virginia, who knocked him up in his hotel room at midnight in late 1931] raised the question of technique, Faulkner talked about Dostoevsky. He could have cut The Brothers Karamazov by two thirds if he had let the brothers tell their stories without authorial exposition, he said. Eventually all straight exposition would be replaced by soliloquies in different coloured inks.

It's a well-known fact that Faulkner believed that Benjy's monologue at the beginning of The Sound and the Fury - literally the tale referred in Macbeth's famous soliloquoy as: "told by an idiot" and "signifying nothing" - could be straightened out most easily by the judicious use of coloured inks.

He was eventually persuaded (reluctantly), that this was beyond the printing technology of the time, but he never stopped hankering after it. The proposal of a limited édition de luxe in 1931 brought the idea to life again, and he sent in a complex scheme of three coloured inks to the printers, who had to abandon the notion, unfortunately, due to the damage to the book trade caused by the Great Depression.

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (Folio Society)

You can't keep a good idea down, though, and in 2012 the Folio Society in London actually published such a book: with a full commentary on the text and a complex battery of no fewer than fourteen different coloured inks!

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (Folio Society)

There's a great deal more to be said about Faulkner, some of which I aspire to include on this blog at some point: his immense influence on such Latin American "Boom" novelists as Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, for instance.

For the moment, though, I'll simply note here the recent completion of the Library of America's five-volume edition of Faulkner's complete novels, all in their revised and "corrected" texts:

William Faulkner: Complete Novels (Library of America)

1. Faulkner, William. Novels 1926-1929: Soldiers’ Pay / Mosquitoes / Flags in the Dust (Sartoris) / The Sound and the Fury. 1926, 1927, 1929 & 1929. Ed. Joseph Blotner & Noel Polk. The Library of America, 164. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2006.


2. Faulkner, William. Novels 1930-1935: As I Lay Dying / Sanctuary / Light in August / Pylon. 1930, 1931, 1932 & 1935. Ed. Joseph Blotner & Noel Polk. The Library of America, 25. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985.


3. Faulkner, William. Novels 1936-1940: Absalom, Absalom! / The Unvanquished / If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms) / The Hamlet. 1936, 1938, 1939 & 1940. Ed. Joseph Blotner & Noel Polk. The Library of America, 48. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1990.


4. Faulkner, William. Novels 1942-1954: Go Down, Moses / Intruder in the Dust / Requiem for a Nun / A Fable. 1942, 1948, 1951 & 1954. Ed. Joseph Blotner & Noel Polk. The Library of America, 73. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1994.


5. Faulkner, William. Novels 1957-1962: The Town / The Mansion / The Reivers. 1957, 1959 & 1962. Ed. Joseph Blotner & Noel Polk. The Library of America, 112. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.

If you add a copy of his Collected Stories (1951) - along with Joeph Blotner's supplementary volume of Uncollected Stories (1979) - you'll have pretty much the whole story laid out in front of you in one convenient canvas.

Here's a listing of my own Faulkner collection. Not complete, certainly, but with most of the books that any but the most abject collector would consider to be indispensable to a close knowledge of the subject. Enjoy!

•


William Faulkner: Sanctuary (1931)

William Cuthbert Falkner [Faulkner]
(1897-1962)

Poetry:


1. Faulkner, William. The Marble Faun and A Green Bough. 1924 & 1933. New York: Random House, Inc., n.d.

Fiction:


2. Faulkner, William. Soldiers' Pay. 1926. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1976.


3. Faulkner, William. Mosquitoes: A Novel. 1927. Introduction by Richard Hughes. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1964.


4. Faulkner, William. Sartoris. 1929. Foreword by Robert Cantwell. 1953. Afterword by Lawrance Thompson. A Signet Classic. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1964.


5. Faulkner, William. Flags in the Dust. 1929. Ed. Douglas Day. 1973. Vintage Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1974.


6. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. Introduction by Richard Hughes. 1954. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.


7. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury: An Authoritative Text / Backgrounds and Contexts / Criticism. 1929. Ed. David Minter. 1984. Second edition. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.


8. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. Ed. Noel Polk & Stephen M. Ross. 2012. London: The Folio Society, 2016.


9. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. 1930. Vintage International. New York: Random House, Inc., 1985.


10. Faulkner, William. Sanctuary. 1931. Penguin Books 899. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1953.


11. Faulkner, William. Sanctuary: The Original Text. 1931. Ed. Noel Polk. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1981.


12. Faulkner, William. Light in August. 1932. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1952.


13. Faulkner, William. Pylon. 1935. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1955.


14. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. Modern Library College Editions. New York: Random House, Inc., 1964.


15. Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. 1938. Penguin Books 1058. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955.


16. Faulkner, William. The Wild Palms. 1939. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.


17. Faulkner, William. The Hamlet: A Novel. 1940. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1958.


18. Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. 1942. Penguin Books 1434. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.


19. Faulkner, William. Intruder in the Dust. 1948. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.


20. Faulkner, William. Knight’s Gambit: Six Stories. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1951.


21. Faulkner, William. The Penguin Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.


22. Faulkner, William. Collected Stories. 1951. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.


23. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. 1951. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.


24. Faulkner, William. A Fable. 1954. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1955.


25. Faulkner, William. Big Woods: The Hunting Stories. Drawings by Edward Shenton. New York: Random House, 1955.


26. Faulkner, William. The Town. 1957. A Vintage Book. New York: Random House, Inc. / Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., n.d.


27. Faulkner, William. The Mansion. 1959. World Books. London: The Reprint Society Ltd. / Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1962.


28. Faulkner, William. The Reivers: A Reminiscence. 1962. Penguin Books 899. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.


29. Blotner, Joseph. Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. 1979. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1980.

Miscellaneous:


30. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. The Essential Faulkner: The Saga of Yoknapatawpha County, 1820-1950. 1946. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 14. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1967.


31. Faulkner, William, ed. The Best of Faulkner. London: The Reprint Society Ltd. / Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1955.


32. Faulkner, William. New Orleans Sketches. Ed. Carvel Collins. 1958. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1967.


33. Faulkner, William. Essays, Speeches and Public Letters. Ed. James B. Meriwether. 1965. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1967.

Secondary Texts:


34. Blotner, Joseph, ed. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, Inc., 1977.


35. Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. William Faulkner’s Life and Work: Over 100 Illustrations; Photographs, Drawings, Facsimiles; Notes and Index; Chronology and Genealogy. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1974.


36. Cowley, Malcolm. The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962. 1966. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1967.

William Faulkner: Snopes (1940, 1957 & 1959)

Memories of Overdevelopment

[Gerald Martin: Gabriel García Márquez (2009)]

There's some interesting stuff in the preface of this biography of Gabriel García Márquez, which I bought in Borders the other day with one of their special email discount offers. The author, Gerald Martin, reveals that he's been working on it for the past twenty years (ever since his previous book, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century came out in 1989, in fact).

It's a fairly hefty tome, but he also mentions that it was originally much longer - roughly two thousand pages long - only he began to despair of finishing it after first he, then "Gabo" (García Márquez's official nickname in the Spanish-speaking world) came down with cancer. Both did eventually recover, but it reminded him that while our studies may have no end, our bodies do. Hence the hasty compilation of this truncated, greatest-hits version of the biography.

I can't help feeling that Martin was wise to take this approach. A striking example of an author who didn't truncate the literary expression of his Herculean labours is Norman Sherry, the biographer of Graham Greene. The first volume of his mighty work (published while Greene was still alive) is informative enough, but after that, in the next two volumes, he goes thoroughly off the rails. Footnotes begin to breed on the borders of the text, replete with strange fancies which appear to have less to do with Greene than with Sherry's own advancing mental illness (I swear there's one that speculates what kind of a news report Greene would have written if he'd present at Christ's crucifixion - hard-hitting, to be sure, but basically true to the facts. It's not that I dispute that Greene might well have written a cogent eye-witness account of Calvary - just what on earth this has to do with anything in particular? Why stop there? What might he have written about the creation of the universe if he'd been present at that? Or about the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Who the hell knows or cares?)

Gabo (or "Gabito", if you want to sound even more unbuttoned) is a writer whose path has intersected with Greene's on many occasions. I'm not sure that it's important to know exactly when or where each of their meetings took place. Martin clearly does know, but he mercifully spares us the details. What's more important is that both are deeply controversial, rather dodgy characters, with an equivocal relationship to tyrants - or men and women of power - throughout the world (Fidel Castro for Gabo, Omar Trujillo for Greene).

Martin's, then, is a fascinating and immediately indispensable account of the Nobel-prize-winning García Márquez's career (indispensable because it fills in the holes in his very partial and self-serving half-autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale - then goes on to tell the rest of the story). The complete version will no doubt see the light of day sometime -- probably after Gabo's death - but it doesn't really matter. This is the book, and it must have been profoundly satisfying to see it finally appear after twenty years.

[Gerald Martin: Journeys Through the Labyrinth (1989)]

Which brings me to the real subject of this post. I guess the real reason I couldn't walk past Gerald Martin's book when I saw it sitting on the shelves there in Borders was because of my vivid memories of its predecessor, Journeys through the Labyrinth. It came out when I was in the last stages of my Doctoral thesis, on portrayals of South America in English literature, and offered me, then, a number of vital clues to my own self-created labyrinth.

Basically the problem was that my series of readings of novels such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), & W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions (1904); natural histories by Humboldt, Darwin, Bates & Wallace; poems & translations by Kathy Acker, Elizabeth Bishop & Angela Carter - all of which went to make up the composite picture of "South America" in the European imagination - had to be somehow reconciled with the works of Latin-American visionaries such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez himself.

I didn't want to retreat onto the then-prevalent notion that all "outsider" views of indigenous cultures were automatically spurious. It didn't seem to be a problem for the locals themselves. García Márquez actually remarked in a book of conversations with his old friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that "Graham Greene taught me to write about the tropics." The Post-colonial, postmodernist version of Latin America offered by the Magic realists seemed to be acting, rather, as a self-reflecting mirror, echoing back the technical innovations of Joyce and Faulkner to a continent and culture which could now proceed to make new sense of them.

Joseph Conrad spent a total of roughly eighteen hours on the soil of South America, which doesn't seem to have prevented him from composing a towering masterpiece, Nostromo, about the complex politics of Colombia, Venezuela and the Panama canal region (albeit renamed Costaguana and Sulaco for the purposes of the narrative). Was his work automatically inferior to (say) García Márquez's own political Dictator-novel Autumn of the Patriarch, also set in a composite country of the imagination? Was it necessary to be from a place, or know it exhaustively, in order to evoke it imaginatively?

What is South America, anyway? Geographically it makes sense to draw a line across the isthmus of Panama, parcelling it off physically from that other huge landmass called North America. Culturally, however, it makes much more sense to draw that line at the Rio Grande, dividing the Norte-Americano United States and Canada from the complex Hispanic-language-speaking melting-pot referred to as "Latin America" - incorporating (as it does) those vast identities known as Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Argentina, and even a considerable portion of the West Indies and the Caribbean.

Yet "South America" was the name which constantly came up - in European literature, at any rate. That composite region of Amazonian Indians, Lost Andean cities, condors, gauchos and conquistadors definitely had its own place in the Western imagination beside the equally equivocal "Darkest Africa," the "Wild West," the "South Seas" or the "Frozen North."

I'm not sure that I ever solved the logistic problems involved in studying so vast and amorphous a subject: no less than a roadmap of a central region of our cultural unconscious. I had a jolly good try, though, and I owe a definite vote of thanks to Gerald Martin's illuminating book for extricating me at the last minute from even worse abysses of uncertainty.

Twnety years, though! I did wonder what he was doing - why the only book of his I'd seen since was an elegant annotated translation of Asturias's classic proto-Magic-Realist novel Men of Maize. It's a long time to be stuck on just one project.

And then came the thought that it's been twenty years (give or take a few) since I last took a good look at my thesis! The subject started to sicken me long before I'd finished it (is it the same with all Doctoral students? Some of them seem to go on to Post-Docs, wallowing round in the same citations and authorities for another couple of years, attempting - sometimes successfully - to turn their vast beached whales into readable books). For myself, though, I felt my mental health required that I change tack completely, start to fixate unhealthily on something else.

That something turned into a five-year flirtation with the 1001 Nights (I call it a flirtation rather than an affair because it had such meager results: a few published essays and conference papers. You can check them all out online here if you're curious why I found the book so fascinating. If it is a book, that is - more, perhaps, like the iceberg-tip of a whole submerged literature ...)

That, in turn, led to my own series of labyrinthine, Nights-inspired narratives: the trilogy of novels that began with Giordano Bruno in 2000 and ended with E M O last year - there's a good ten years of work in there, too.

But twenty years! The thing is, Gerald Martin's hero-quest has inspired me to go back to my own roots and take another look at that great carcass of a PhD thesis. I approached some publishers at the time, but nobody was biting, and of course a lot has happened since in that field, and (indeed) in the whole area of literary criticism and theory. Some of it still seems of interest to me, though - an honest expression of perplexity at the magnitude of an impossible task, but one which perhaps carved a few tracks through the jungle of Western visions / versions / distortions of the Other.

Anyway, whether it interests anyone else or not, I've decided to transfer the whole thing to a website here. It's unfinished as yet. One of the things about that two-decade gap is that it makes me realise how much we've all had to live on the cusp of technology throughout those years. I did write the thesis on a computer - whereas my Masters thesis (1985) was tapped out laboriously on a manual typewriter - but it was the Edinburgh university mainframe, and there was no obvious way to save the data on any kind of floppy disc or other encoding device at the time.

My "thesis", then, consists of three-hundred odd loose-leaf sheets of paper which I'm gradually scanning and collating into an electronic file, and thence putting up online. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite it too much, but I am replacing footnote references with inline citations,and making various other hopefully labour-saving alterations. The bibliography, appendices and introduction are all up, though, and I imagine by the end of the year (at the latest) that the rest will have followed them into cyberspace.

I conclude this post for the moment, then, with two pictures. One comes from the 1968 film-adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes' classic novel about growing up poor in Cuba, Memories of Underdevelopment - albeit linked to an extremely artful book and film, I guess this image might be said to stand in for the reality of Latin American poverty and political turmoil.

[Memories of Underdevelopment]

The other, Antonio Ruíz's "El sueño de la Malinche" [Malinche's dream] has fascinated me since the first moment I saw it (on the dustjacket of Gerald Martin's Journeys through the Labryrinth, actually). Malinche (or Dona Marina), as you no doubt know, was the Indian woman who acted as an interpreter to the conquistador Cortes, thus greatly faciliating his otherwise virtually-inexplicable conquest of the Aztec Empire. Interpreter and mistress - she bore him a child, also, who has been described as "the first Mexican" - the first human being to suffer that particular and peculiar imbalance between Old World and New World, Spanish and Indian, Coloniser and Colonised, which has since afflicted so much of the globe we all live on.

Malinche's dream of spires and churches might be seen, then, as more of a nightmare - but was the colossal, merciless violence of the Spanish conquistadors really worse than the monotonous diet of human sacrifice and warfare which the Aztecs imposed on their somewhat more peaceful neighbours? Who knows? Who can possibly say? Weighing up oppressors and miseries against each other can be a rather fraught procedure.

One thing is certain. Ruiz's painting (for me, at any rate) perfectly portrays this point of balance, the single woman on whom the fate of Empires and whole cultures rests - a Indian Madonna with the first Latin-American growing in her womb. It reminds me that I'll never regret having spent five years of my life looking for some answers to the questions posed by such images of colonial (and post-colonial) identity.

To a New Zealander they have a certain everyday relevance which is perhaps a little difficult to convey to Europeans. Finally, though, Conrad, Hudson, Darwin, Bishop and the others still seem to me have vital contributions to make to our understanding of this conundrum of the divided self - the need to feel remorse for a rapacious, violent past, and yet the equally strong necessity not to be paralysed by such a crippling mountain of guilt.

In each case, it seemed to me then and now, they took a worthy place beside the magicians of the Latin American literary "boom" - Jose Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Gabito - by dint of the sheer "intensity of attention" (the phrase is W. H. Auden's) each of them paid to this adopted country of their imagination: call it "South America" or what you will. Intensity of attention ...

"or, less pompously, love."

[Antonio Ruíz: El sueño de la Malinche (1939)]