Staying Close, Going Afar

I had the unexpected fun of meeting in a Washington think tank a person I greatly admired.

- 

Handsome even in his eighties, Mario Vargas Llosa, white-haired and elegant, is the greatest living writer in Spanish. He won the Nobel (and six other awards) for his novels, social and political, comedies and thrillers, but he is also a scintillating essayist and critic who found time to be a presidential candidate in Peru. I loved it when he digressed to talk about his first novel that made him famous.

When young Mario Vargas Llosa told his father that he wrote poems and stories, his father thought him rather effeminate and sent him to a military school to toughen up. The result was the opposite. Llosa was so thrilled to meet, for the first time, teens from all strata of society that he wrote a scathing novel, The City and The Dogs (Llosa hated the title of the English translation, The Time of the Hero), about the Leoncio Prado Academy and its cadets, uncovering its machismo and brutality, class distinctions and shameful injustice. The Academy tried to burn the book, but it became a bestseller and a remarkable author's career was launched.

What intrigued me was that Mario Vargas Llosa said though the novel's incidents occurred in Lima and he wrote parts of the book in Peru, the book took its final shape as he lived with his father in France and Switzerland.