Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize for Literature
The book
The fine company of Lima, mid-1950s: Julia, 32 years old, pretty, lively and freshly divorced, has traveled to her sister's capital to look for a new husband. Until the right match is found, she spends her time with her nephew Mario. The 18-year-old law student is resting all the hopes of the family. But Mario wants to become a writer. He dreams of Paris - and more recently of Aunt Julia. Before the two get used to it, the little flirtation becomes a serious love. When the family gets wind of it, they want to avoid a scandal - and bring the two apart again at any price.
Turbulent, amusing and lively, Vargas Llosa has worked its own story here.
The author
Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He studied law and humanities and is one of the most important Spanish-speaking contemporary authors. Today Mario Vargas Llosa lives in Madrid, London, Paris and Lima. Most recently, he published the novel "The bad girl" and the essay "The world of Juan Carlos Onetti".
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Leseprobe "Aunt Julia and the art writer"
At that time, it was a long time ago when I was still very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with whitewashed walls on Calle Ocharán in Miraflores. I studied in San Marcos, Jura, I think, and had resigned myself to the fact that I would later have to make a living with a civilian vocation, though I would much rather have become a writer. I had a job with a pompous title, modest salary, plagiaristic work methods and working hours. I was head of news for Radio Panamericana. The work consisted of cutting interesting news items out of the papers and doing a bit of tweaking so they could be sent as messages.
My editors consisted of a guy with pomadised hair who loved catastrophes and was called Pascual. There were one-minute short messages every hour except 12 o'clock and 9 o'clock, which were fifteen minutes long. But we always put together several programs so that I could travel a lot, drink a cup of coffee at the Colmena, sometimes go to a lecture or to the offices of Radio Central, where it was much more entertaining than ours.
The two radio stations had the same owner and lay side by side in the Calle Belén, near the Plaza San Martín. They did not look alike. Rather, they were as opposite as the two sisters of the fairy tale, one of which was full of grace and the other of infirmity. Radio Panamericana occupied the second floor and the attic of a new building and showed with his staff, his ambitions and his program a certain alienating and snobbish flair, a penchant for the modern, the youth, the aristocracy. Although the speakers were not Argentineans (Pedro Camacho would have said), they could have been. There was a lot of music, a lot of jazz and rock and a bit of classical music.
The frequencies of Radio Panamericana were the first to bring the latest hits from New York and Europe, but even Latin American music was not neglected as long as it was a bit shabby; Peruvian music was treated with care and limited to the Vals. Programs with a certain intellectual touch, images of the past, international commentary, and even in the entertainment programs, the quiz or the talent search programs, were noticeable that they were trying to avoid too much platitude or vulgarity. An example of the current open-mindedness was the information service that Pascual and I produced in a rooftop shed, from which we could see the rubbish dumps and the last dormer windows of the Lima roofs. One got there in an elevator whose doors had the disquieting habit of opening oneself ahead of time.
Radio Central, on the other hand, squeezed into an ancient building with many courtyards, nooks and crannies, and all that was needed was to hear the casual manner of the speakers, who used far too much slang to instantly recognize the penchant for mass and popularity. There was hardly any news, and Peruvian music involving the Andes was the undisputed queen there.Not infrequently, the Indian singers from the pleasure tents took part in the open-minded events for which hours before the beginning of the masses of people gathered in front of the doors of the broadcasting hall. Radio Central's frequencies also shook lavishly in Caribbean, Mexican and Argentinian music. The programs were simple, unimaginative and successful: requests by phone, birthday serenade, movie and Popstarklatsch. But the main course, hearty and always served again, which secured all listeners surveys huge listener quotas, were the radio plays series.
At least half a dozen were broadcast daily, and I enjoyed watching the recordings from the speakers. They were run-down, hungry and ragged actors, whose juvenile, ingratiating, crystal-clear voices contrasted with their old faces, their bitter mouths and tired eyes in a frightening way. "On the day that television is introduced in Peru, only suicide remains," Genaro Jr. said. and pointing to them through the windows of the studio, grouped around the microphone like a big aquarium, the texts in hand, ready to begin with Chapter Twenty-four of the "Alvear Family." And really, how disappointed would have been the housewives, who had melted away at the sound of Luciano Pando's voice, if they could have seen his hunchbacked body and his squinting gaze; and how disillusioned would all the retirees have been, in which the melodious sounds of Josefina Sánchez awakened memories, they would have known of their double chin, their mustache, their protruding ears, and their varicose veins.
But the introduction of television in Peru was still in the distant future, and the discrete earning of the radio play fauna did not seem to be jeopardized for the moment. I had always been interested in the springs from the series that continued to fill my grandmother's afternoons, the stories of which I heard from my aunt Laura, my aunt Olga, my aunt Gaby or my many cousins when I visited them. (Our family was biblical, miraflorinian and inseparable). I suspected the radio plays came from abroad, but was surprised to hear that the Genaros were buying them not in Mexico or Argentina but in Cuba. The series was produced by the CMQ, a radio and television empire governed by Goar Mestre, a silver-haired gentleman whom I once saw walking the hallways of Radio Panamericana while in Lima, escorted by the owners and numerous awesome ones Look.
I heard speakers, entertainers and radio hosts talk so much about CMQ from Cuba? it was something as mythical as the Hollywood of that time to the cineastes? that sometimes Javier and I had fantasized over Bransa coffee over that army of prolific writers in the distant Havana of palm trees, paradisiacal beaches, gunslingers and tourists In the air-conditioned offices of the Citadel of Goar Mestre, eight hours a day on quiet typewriters had to produce those streams of adultery, suicide, passions, encounters, inheritances, reverences, coincidences, and crimes that spilled from the Antilles island all over Latin America and into the voices by Luciano Pando and Josefina Sánchez the afternoons of the grandmothers, aunts, cousins and retirees of every country enchanted. Genaro jun. bought (or better CMQ sold) the radio plays by weight and by telegram.
He had told me that one day when I asked him to his biggest amazement, whether he, his brothers or his father checked the texts before they were sent.
"Could you read seventy kilos of paper?" He replied, looking at me with that benevolent condescension that was my intellectual status, which he granted me ever since he had seen a tale of mine in the Sunday edition of El Comercio.
