Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

As much objection I have to his elitist Latin American views and his views on “those poor” and the “boot strap” theory of why  Latin America as a whole cannot progress, I applaud his CREATIVE work and his immaculate sense of language and rhythm. He joins his eminent colleagues Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Now if we could only get a FEMALE writer in that mix, wouldn’t that be amazing? Buen trabajo, viejo...

-vee
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Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature


By JULIE BOSMAN and SIMON ROMERO
Published: October 7, 2010
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Times Topics: Mario Vargas Llosa
Nobel Prizes

From the Archives: Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (October 12, 2006) Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”

In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. Recent winners include Herta Muller, the Romanian-born German novelist, last year, Orhan Pamuk of Turkey in 2007 and Harold Pinter of Britain in 2005.

In 1990, Mr. Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru and has been an outspoken activist in his native country. The news that he had won the prize reached him at 5 a.m., when he was hard at work in his apartment in New York, preparing to set out on a walk in Central Park, he told a radio station in Peru. Initially, he thought it was a prank.

“It was a grand surprise,” he said. “It’s a good way to start a New York day.”

He is currently spending the semester in the United States, teaching Latin American studies at Princeton University.

The prize is the first for a writer in the Spanish language in two decades, after Mexico’s Octavio Paz won the Nobel in 1990, and focuses new attention on the Latin American writers who gained renown in the 1960s, like Julio Cortazar of Argentina and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, who formed the region’s literary “boom generation.”

In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.’”

Beyond his own political activities, Mr. Vargas Llosa has explored in his novels how politics feels to ordinary people.

“They’re not only fantastic novels that read beautifully,” Ruben Gallo, a professor of Spanish-American literature at Princeton University, said on Thursday. “He’s one of the authors who in the 20th century has written the most eloquently and the most poignantly about the intersection between culture and politics in Latin America.”

Born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, Mr. Vargas Llosa first realized that he wanted to be a writer when he was a child, enthralled with adventure novels by Jules Verne.

He spent much of his early childhood in Cochabamba, Bolivia, then moved with his parents to a middle-class suburb of Lima. He studied law and literature at the University of San Marcos in Lima in the mid-1950s — a tumultuous and violent time in Peru — and later drew from the experience to write “Conversation in the Cathedral,” a novel published in 1969.

After college, he spent time writing for newspapers and, like many Latin American writers, began his literary career abroad, living in Paris, Madrid and London as a young man.

His work found a wide international audience in the 1960s with the publication of “The Time of the Hero,” a novel based on a Peruvian military academy that aroused some controversy in his home country. By the early 1980s, he was perhaps the best-selling Latin American writer in the world, having published “Green House,” “Conversation in the Cathedral” and “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” among other works.

A brief and unsuccessful effort as an elected official came later. While Peru was besieged by high inflation and the attacks by the Maoists of the Shining Path in 1990, Mr. Vargas Llosa made a quixotic run for the presidency of Peru, opposing Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist.

Mr. Vargas Llosa was ahead in polls for much of his campaign, but some factors may have worked against him: his aristocratic bearing in impoverished Peru and his acknowledgment at one point in the race that in the largely Roman Catholic country, he was an agnostic.

He also expressed some ambivalence about abandoning his career as a writer to serve in public office.

“I’d like to campaign on the issues and then return to my office to write,” he said in an interview in 1988. “But I’ve accepted this as a moral responsibility. While I have the impression that I’m helping, I’ll keep going.”

Mr. Fujimori triumphed in the race, and the failed bid left Mr. Vargas Llosa with a sour taste for politics in his country. Mr. Fujimori ended up adopting many of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s market-oriented policy ideas. He later fled to Japan when his government collapsed and is now serving time in a Peruvian prison after being convicted of human rights abuses.

After Mr. Vargas Llosa’s foray into politics, his influence in the Spanish-speaking world became more widespread through a column he writes for El Pais, the Spanish daily newspaper in Madrid, called “Piedra de Toque,” or “Touchstone.” In the column, which is distributed in newspapers throughout Latin America, he explores themes including literature, travel and the politics of the Middle East and Latin America.

The previous Nobel laureate of the boom generation, Mr. García Márquez of Colombia, won his prize after wide acclaim for his masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In a twist worthy of one of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s subplots, he and Mr. García Márquez, at one point close friends, had a violent falling out in 1976 in Mexico City.

The episode unfolded at a film premiere. When Mr. García Márquez approached Mr. Vargas Llosa to embrace him, the Peruvian writer instead punched him in the face, giving him a black eye, an image immortalized days later by the photographer Rodrigo Moya. Mystery shrouds what happened, but apparently the feud had to do with Mr. Vargas Llosa’s wife, whom Mr. García Márquez had consoled earlier in Paris.

Since 1901, 102 Nobel Prizes in literature have been awarded. The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison, in 1993.

The awards ceremony is planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm. As the winner, Mr. Vargas Llosa will receive 10 million kronor, or about $1.5 million.

SAD NEWS:El Centro de la Raza leader, co-founder Roberto Maestas dies

REST IN PEACE...

El Centro de la Raza leader, co-founder Roberto Maestas dies Co-founder and Executive Director of El Centro de la Raza, Roberto Maestas.

by KING 5 News

SEATTLE -- Roberto Maestas, the long time leader and co-founder of El Centro de la Raza, a center for Seattle's Latino community, died Wednesday morning, organization officials say.

Maestas was long involved in the ongoing civil rights movement in Seattle. According to the University of Washington Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project page, Maestas was born in New Mexico in a small farming community and worked his way north through the migrant stream, first to Colorado and eventually to Seattle, permanently settling in the city in the 1950s.

Maestas was educated as a teacher and taught at Franklin High School before leaving secondary teaching and pursuing a graduate degree at the University of Washington in 1968. At the University, he became involved with the Chicano student activism, the black freedom struggle, and farm worker organizing in the Yakima valley.

Maestas helped form a program at South Seattle Community for Adult Basic Education and English as a Second Language (ESL) to cater to the city's growing Latino community in the early 1970s.

When funding for the program was abruptly cut-off in the fall of 1972, Maestas, his fellow teachers and students, and a number of community activists peaceably occupied the abandoned Beacon Hill School and negotiated its conversion into a community center, El Centro de la Raza.

In addition to providing a range of social services, El Centro played a prominent role in local solidarity campaigns with Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. Maestas also co-founded the Minority Executive Directors's Coalition in the 1980s with fellow "Gang of Four" colleages Bernie Whitebear, Larry Gossett and Bob Santos.

King County Executive Dow Constantine and Councilmember Larry Gossett issued statements on the passing of Maestas.

"I have long known Roberto Maestas as a vibrant leader of the Latino community and the larger community, a man whose greatest skill was bringing people together, and a champion of equal rights for all. We will miss him," said Constantine.

"We lost a lion today. Roberto was relentless in his pursuit of justice, while offering service and support to those in need. The spark he and colleagues Councilmember Larry Gossett, Bob Santos, and the late Bernie Whitebear created those many years ago will continue to light the way in our community for years to come. Roberto's devotion to equity and social justice made him an inspiration to political leaders of our time. I have ordered that the flags over King County buildings be flown at half-staff in his honor."

Gossett said "Roberto was the pre-eminent leader and political activist of our time when it comes to all the important movements for social change which have taken place in the Pacific Northwest over the past 40 years."

"When Native Americans struggled for fishing rights in the late '60s and early '70s, Roberto was on the front line. When Black construction workers rose up in 1969 and demanded a fair share of construction jobs in our community, Roberto was there. When poor and disenfranchised Latinos organized to improve their community, Roberto was there to lead the struggle to create El Centro de La Raza."

"He has been there for striking garbage workers, the women's movement for abortion rights, the resistance of Asian communities to the encroachment of the Kingdome - Roberto has been there for every genuine effort to bring about meaningful improvement to the life conditions of people throughout Martin Luther King Jr. County. And because of his legacy we will sorely miss his tremendous contributions to our community."

Mayor Mike McGinn said Maestas "often spoke of building a 'beloved community' through nonviolence, community engagement and an empowered citizenry. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the 'beloved community' as a world where poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated. Where racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be defeated by brotherhood and sisterhood. We are lowering city flags to half-mast today to respect his passing. We encourage all to honor his memory by working for his 'beloved community.'"