Internationally acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has contributed a biweekly column to Spain's major newspaper, El País, since 1977. In this collection of columns from the 1990s, Vargas Llosa weighs in on the burning questions of the last decade, including the travails of
Latin American democracy, the role of religion in civic life, and the future of globalization. But Vargas Llosa's influence is hardly limited to politics. In some of the liveliest critical writing of his career, he makes a pilgrimage to Bob Marley's shrine in Jamaica, celebrates the sexual abandon of Carnaval in Rio, and examines the legacies of Vermeer, Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others.
Internationally acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has contributed a biweekly column to Spain's major newspaper, El País, since 1977. In this collection of columns from the 1990s, Vargas Llosa weighs in on the burning questions of the last decade, including the travails of
Latin American democracy, the role of religion in civic life, and the future of globalization. But Vargas Llosa's influence is hardly limited to politics. In some of the liveliest critical writing of his career, he makes a pilgrimage to Bob Marley's shrine in Jamaica, celebrates the sexual abandon of Carnaval in Rio, and examines the legacies of Vermeer, Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others.
The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary
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The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary
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Overview
Internationally acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has contributed a biweekly column to Spain's major newspaper, El País, since 1977. In this collection of columns from the 1990s, Vargas Llosa weighs in on the burning questions of the last decade, including the travails of
Latin American democracy, the role of religion in civic life, and the future of globalization. But Vargas Llosa's influence is hardly limited to politics. In some of the liveliest critical writing of his career, he makes a pilgrimage to Bob Marley's shrine in Jamaica, celebrates the sexual abandon of Carnaval in Rio, and examines the legacies of Vermeer, Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo, and Octavio Paz, among others.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429921893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2011 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 358 KB |
About the Author
Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's foremost author and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1994 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and in 1995 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His many distinguished works include The Storyteller, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Bad Girl, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Way to Paradise, and The War of the End of the World. He lives in London.
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He has also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG.
Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Lady from Somerset
The story is as decorous and discreet as she herself must have been, and as unreal as the romances she wrote and devoured until the end of her days. That it happened as it did and that it now forms part of reality is moving proof of the power of fiction, that beguiling lie which every so often comes true in the most unexpected of ways.
The beginning of the story is surprising, and quite suspenseful. Great Britain's Society of Authors was informed by an executor that a woman, recently deceased, had left it all her worldly goods — £400,000, some $700,000 — in order that it establish an annual literary prize for novelists under the age of thirty-five. The winning work had to be "of a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, nature." The news hit the front pages instantly, because the prize thus created — $70,000 a year — was four or five times bigger than either the Booker McConnell or the Whitbread, the two most prestigious British literary awards.
Who was the generous donor? A novelist, of course. But the shamefaced directors of the Society of Authors had to confess to the press that they had never heard of Miss Margaret Elizabeth Trask. And despite their best efforts, they had not been able to find even one of her books in London bookstores.
Nevertheless, Miss Trask had published more than fifty romance novels since the 1930s under a nom de plume that shortened her given name and made it sound slightly less aristocratic: Betty Trask. The titles of the books suggest the nature of their content: I Tell My Heart, Irresistible, And Confidential, Rustle of Spring, Bitter Sweetbriar. The last appeared in 1957, and no copies of any of them were to be found at the offices of Miss Trask's publishers or the literary agency that handled her rights. In order to have a look at one, the reporters on the trail of the mysterious English literary philanthropist had to bury themselves in those odd neighborhood libraries which even today lend out romance novels for a modest yearly fee.
Thus the biography of the enchanting Miss Trask was reconstructed. Unlike her Spanish counterpart, Corín Tellado, she refused to adjust her moral standards to the times, and in 1957 she put down her pen, realizing that the gap between everyday life and her novels was growing too wide. Her books, which, judging by the money she left, were very popular, fell immediately into oblivion. This seems not to have mattered at all to Miss Trask, who outlived her work by more than a quarter century.
The most extraordinary thing about Margaret Elizabeth Trask, who devoted her life to reading and writing about love, is that in all her eighty-eight years she never had a single romantic experience. The evidence is conclusive: she died single and a virgin, body and soul. Those who knew her speak of her as a relic of another age, a Victorian or Edwardian anachronism lost in the century of hippies and punks.
Her family came from Frome, in Somerset; they were prosperous silk manufacturers. Miss Margaret received a strict and careful education at home. She was a shy, attractive girl with aristocratic ways who lived in Bath and Belgravia, London's most exclusive neighborhood. The family fortune dried up when her father died, but Miss Trask's habits, already frugal, weren't much altered by this change. She never enjoyed much of a social life, went out very infrequently, claimed a benign allergy to men, and never permitted any flirtatious compliments. The love of her life was her mother, whom she cared for devotedly after her father's death. This caretaking, and the writing of romances at the rate of two a year, were the sum total of her life.
Thirty-five years ago, the two women returned to Somerset and rented a tiny house on a dead-end street in their hometown of Frome. Miss Trask's mother died in the early sixties, and Miss Trask's life became a neighborhood enigma. She rarely ventured out, she was coolly and distantly polite, she neither received visitors nor made visits herself.
The only person able to speak of her with some familiarity was the director of the Frome library, to which Miss Trask belonged. She was an insatiable reader of love stories, though she also liked biographies of unusual men and women. The librarian made a weekly trip to her house, bringing her books and picking them up again.
As the years went by, the frail Miss Margaret's health began to deteriorate. The neighbors deduced this from the appearance of a National Health nurse, who began to come once a week to give her massages. (In her will, Miss Trask rewarded these attentions with the cautious sum of two hundred pounds.) Five years ago, her condition worsened until she could no longer live alone. She was taken to a nursing home, where, surrounded by the poor, she continued to live the austere, discreet, nearly invisible life she had always lived.
Her neighbors in Frome couldn't believe their eyes when they read that the spinster of Oakfield Road had left so much money to the Society of Authors and that she was a writer. What they found even harder to understand was why, instead of using her £400,000 to live more comfortably, she had given the money away to reward the writing of romance novels. They spoke condescendingly of Miss Trask to newspaper and television reporters, and said how sad and dreary life must have been for someone who never invited anyone over for tea.
Her neighbors in Frome were fools, of course, as are all those who believe that Margaret Elizabeth Trask should be pitied for her life of quiet routine. In fact, Miss Margaret lived a wonderful, enviable life, full of excitement and adventure. In it there were astounding deeds of derring-do, wild passions sparked by smoldering glances, and acts of generosity, sacrifice, nobility, and bravery like those in episodes out of the lives of the saints or novels of chivalry.
Miss Trask had no time to socialize with her neighbors or gossip about the high cost of living or the behavior of today's disrespectful youth because every minute of her life was concentrated on impossible passions: burning lips brushing lily-white fingers and causing young maidens to blossom like roses; knives buried with fierce tenderness in the hearts of unfaithful lovers. Why should Miss Trask have gone out to walk the stony streets of Frome? Could that miserably real little town have offered her anything like the sumptuous country houses, the farmhouses battered by storms, the haunted forests, the marble pavilions alongside lagoons that were the settings of her dreams and imaginings? Of course Miss Trask avoided making friends or talking to anyone. Why should she have wasted her time with people as ordinary and limited as the living? The truth is that she had many friends. They kept her from being bored for even an instant in her modest little house on Oakfield Road, and they never said anything stupid, out of place, or unpleasant. Who among the earthbound could speak with the charm, respect, and wisdom of the ghosts of Miss Trask's novels when they whispered in her ear?
Margaret Elizabeth Trask's existence was surely more intense, varied, and dramatic than that of many of her contemporaries. Propelled by a certain upbringing and her own particular idiosyncracies, she inverted the relationship that usually establishes itself in human beings between the imaginary and the real, or what is dreamed and what is lived. What generally happens is that people, caught up in their busy existences, "live" the majority of the time and dream the rest. Miss Trask went about it the other way. She devoted her days and nights to fantasy and shrank what we call living down to a bare minimum.
Was she happier than those who prefer reality to fiction? I think she was. If she wasn't, why should she have left all her money to encourage the writing of romance novels? Isn't that proof that she went to the next world convinced she was right to exchange the reality of life for the lies of literature? Though many see it as an outrageous document, her will is in fact a stern judgment on the odious world into which she was born and in which she contrived not to live.
London, May 1983
CHAPTER 2
Shadows of Friends
I've been noticing with some alarm that many of the friends I made and spent time with in Barcelona in the sixties are no longer with us. Hardly a trace is left, either, of the city I knew then. In those days Barcelona was down-at-the-heels, cosmopolitan, and international; now it is extremely rich, provincial, and nationalist. Before, it surged culturally toward the rest of the world; today it seems fascinated by its own navel. This self-absorption is fashionable in Europe, and it is the natural response of the conservative and traditionalist strain of long-established cultures to the growing internationalization of life and to the headlong rush of the modern world toward the dissolution of boundaries and confusion of cultures. But in Catalonia, the return to the "tribal instinct," whatever its deep political roots, contradicts another venerable tradition: universalism, so characteristic of the region's great creators, from Foix to Pla and from Tàpies to Dalí.
My friends were all citizens of the world. Gabriel Ferrater wrote his poems in Catalan because, he said, he could "kick better goals" in his native tongue than in Spanish (we were both soccer fans), but he wasn't a nationalist, or anything that required any kind of faith. All convictions and passions, except possibly literature, inspired in him a barbed and biting sarcasm, spiked with ferociously cynical metaphors. Just as others squander time or money, Gabriel squandered his genius writing book reviews and encyclopedia entries, talking to friends, and consuming lethal quantities of gin.
"Genius" is a big word, but I don't know how else to describe the monstrous ability Gabriel had to learn everything about whatever he was interested in and become an instant expert on a subject. Then he'd lose interest, and move on. To call him a dilettante suggests he was superficial, and there was nothing superficial about the way he'd eviscerate Picasso in a discussion about art, wave his arms like a windmill as he argued the linguistic theories of the Prague Circle, or quote from memory in an effort to prove that Kafka's German derived from police reports. I'm sure it's true that he learned Polish in hardly any time at all just so he could read and translate Gombrowicz. He could, after all, read all the languages of the world, and he spoke all of them with a heavy Catalan accent.
Maybe "excessive" is the term, along with "genius," that best describes him. Everything about him was over-the-top, from his voracious reading and learning to his long, restless hands, which, after a first drink, would make the ladies around him jump. Because I voted for João Guimarães Rosa over Witold Gombrowicz when we were on a jury together, he punished me by depriving me of a year of his friendship. On the three hundred and sixty-fifth day, I received a book by Carles Riba inscribed with the following lines: "Now that the year of punishment is over, we can pick up where we left off, etcetera. Gabriel."
They say that he always claimed it was immoral to reach the age of fifty and that this coy declaration explains why he killed himself. It might be true: it accords very well with the strange mix of anarchism, insolence, discipline, sweetness, and narcissism that constituted his character. The last time I saw him it was ten in the morning, and he was at the Bar del Colón. He had been drinking for almost twenty-four hours and he looked flushed and exultant. With Juanito García Hortelano patiently listening, he was shouting hoarsely, reciting Rilke in German.
Unlike Gabriel, García Hortelano was reserved, even-tempered, obliging, and, above all, modest in the display of his intelligence, which he disguised behind a hearty, good-natured facade and a veil of humor. He wasn't from Barcelona, but it was in Barcelona that I met him and saw him many times, more often than in Madrid. The day we met, we went out together to buy a Catalan grammar book, and we confessed to each other our fondness for Catalonia. In my memory I can't dissociate him from Barcelona or the sixties, the decade in which his first novels were published — an era that, with everything that has happened since, has come to seem prehistoric.
When I was a child, I played with friends in Lima trying to guess which writers would go to heaven (if it existed), and it seemed to us that of the classic authors few would be chosen, and of contemporary writers none at all. I'm very much afraid that if that hypothetical Judgment Day comes, we'll be deprived of Juan, because he'll be whisked up instantly. Of all the men of letters I've known, he's the only one who qualifies. I'm joking, but at the same time I'm deadly serious. I've never met anyone among my colleagues who seemed so honest and upright, so naturally decent, so free from vanity and deceitfulness, so generous as Juan. Goodness is a mysterious and grating virtue, and one that, in my experience — dispiriting, I admit — has much to do with lack of imagination and simplicity of mind, and with a naïveté that comes across as candor. That's why it's not popular, and why, in rarefied cultural circles, it is regarded with distrust and disdain, as a proof of idiocy. And it is also why the good man who possesses a subtle mind and a refined sensibility is a disconcerting rarity.
It's true that bad people tend to be more fun than good people and that goodness is usually boring. But García Hortelano broke the mold here, too, because he was one of the funniest people in the world, a constant source of stories, inventions, intellectual games, nicknames, and plays on words that could keep the night patrons of the narrow Bar Cristal entertained for hours. With the same seriousness with which he assured us that Walter Benjamin was a pseudonym of Jesús Aguirre, I heard him swear once that he went to the red-light district of Las Ramblas at dawn only to buy the newspaper La Vanguardia.
Among the many things that I once planned to write but never will is a magic meeting with him on a foggy morning by the sea at Calafell. As in his novels, much was happening and nothing at all. We had listened to the debut record of a singer called Raimón, which Luis Goytisolo had brought with him; guided by our host, Carlos Barral, we had visited bars and restaurants, traipsed around boats and fishermen, and made a fire on the beach. For a long time, Jaime Gil de Biedma held us rapt with electrifying stories of evil deeds. At midnight we swam, in a fog that made ghosts of us. We got out, dried ourselves off, talked a little, and all of a sudden someone asked where Juan could be; he was nowhere to be found. Surely, we thought, he had gone to bed. Much later, I went to plunge again into the water and fog. Wreathed in wisps of mist, the writer appeared, shivering. What was he doing there, chilled to the bone? Teeth chattering, he told me that he couldn't find his way off the beach. Each time he tried, he seemed to be heading toward Sicily or Tunisia. And why hadn't he cried for help or called out? Cry for help? Call out? Only a bad novelist would do that.
Unlike Juan, Jaime Gil de Biedma was utterly lacking in modesty, and cultivated intellectual arrogance the way others cultivate their gardens or breed dogs. He started arguments in order to demolish his opponents, and when admirers of his poetry approached him full of unctuous praise, his retorts would leave them reeling. He did everything he could to seem unpleasant, arrogant, unapproachable. But he wasn't as bad as he would have liked to be, or as tough and cerebral as he made himself seem in his Diario del artista seriamente enfermo (Diary of a Seriously Ill Artist). Late at night, in conversation with a few close friends, he'd tire of posing and let the bad-boy mask fall, and the sensitive reader would appear, the man torn between his vocation and his work, the man of ambivalent sexuality, the vulnerable and tormented young writer of verse.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Language of Passion"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Mario Vargas Llosa.
Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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Table of Contents
Author's Note
Touchstone
The Lady from Somerset
Shadows of Friends
The Morality of Cynics
Postmodernism and Frivolity
Tragicomedy of a Jew
God Will Provide
Aid for the First World
Italy Is Not Bolivia
The Death of the Great Writer
Trench Town Rock
The Prince of Doom
Under the Skies of Jerusalem
French Identity
The Sign of the Cross
Ceausescu's House
The Joys of Necrophilia
The Old Man with the Bunions
A Bourgeios Paradise
Cassandra's Prophecies
The Immigrants
The Devil's Advocate
A Defense of Sects
A Walk through Hebron
Seven Years, Seven Days
Nudes in a Classical Garden
Epitaph for a Library
The Hour of the Charlatans
Elephant Dung
A Maiden
Mandela's Island
The Other Side of Paradise
Painting to Survive
The Language of Passion
The City of Nests
The Unborn Child
New Inquisitions
The Weaker Sex
Predators
The Permanent Erection
The Lost Battle of Monsieur Monet
A Death So Sweet
Fataumata's Feet
The Suicide of a Nation
The Alexandrian
The Life and Trials of Elián
Pernicious Futility
Index