“A declaration of principles”: three renowned Colombian writers write about “Losvientos”, by Vargas Llosa

A veteran journalist, who has come out to protest the closure of an old cinema in Madrid, suddenly finds himself faced with the problem of not remembering where his house is. He begins to walk, hoping to find his way back, and at the same time he embarks on a journey through what has been his life, his profession and that exquisite intellectual world in which he lived immersed for much of his existence and which today oday seems to disappear so inexorably like his memory, or like those movie theaters he wanted to defend in a useless exercise of nostalgia.

This is the origin of “Losvientos”, the latest story by Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, of which three renowned Colombian authors have shared their impressions for GlobeLiveMedia.

Andres Mauricio Munoz. His short story book “Desaosiegos menores” was considered one of the five best fiction books published in 2011 in Colombia. He has also published the anthology of short stories “There are days when we left” (2017) and the novels “El último donjuán” (2016) and “Las Margaritas” (2019).

Through the lucidity of an older man who cannot return home, because he does not remember the way, lost in the folds of his memory, Vargas Llosa warns against the degradation of art, of culture, which march towards new times lacerated by a , virtual reality, which will end up imposing its premises. “Losvientos” can be read as a refusal to install the nostalgia to which the character clings as his last redoubt. Beyond the allusions to Carmencita, this woman he left in exchange for another who was not worth it, and whom the tabloids strive to associate with his ex-girlfriend, we are, before everything, before a declaration of principles before which we must never give up. This story is the literary testimony of a social anatomy, but also of a masterful dissection.

Ramona of Jesus. Colombian poet and boxer living in Germany. His first collection of poems, “Two square meters of skin”, won the National Prize for Unpublished Poetry 2020. He received a literary creation grant from the Berlin government and a writing residency from the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. .

There is a baroque anecdote attributed to Henri de Saint-Simon: in one winter they made a series of masks which were to perfectly imitate the faces of the courtiers. When the carnival came, they put on their masks using more ordinary masks over them. At the end of the party, the group was asked to remove their masks and the guests thought, deceived, that they were face to face with the real faces of the courtiers, when in reality what they saw were only the wax masks behind which they were. someone who never showed up. People were very amused by this joke.

This deception, this artifice, is literature. A text must generate this impression of nudity, it must make the reader believe that the mask has been removed and that what is before his eyes is a real face, in all its grandeur or its decay, but a human face. Literature demands that this ruse be carried out. And while the value and success of a text depends on how good that wax mask is under the ordinary mask, it should be celebrated every time a writer at least tries the magic trick.

There is of course another class of texts, other masked balls, in which the courtiers prefer not to take off their mask of dog, old man or writer all night long, and the reader, the guest, enters home intact, without the impression of having seen a face.

Santiago Wills. Writer and journalist. National Simón Bolívar Prize (2016 and 2021). His first novel, “Jaguar”, was a semi-finalist for the Herralde Prize in 2020.

It is characteristic of people who do not write fiction to allow themselves to be surprised by coincidences or autobiographical allusions in tales and novels – the famous “Madame Bovary c’est moi”, by Flaubert, one of the Vargas Llosa favorites–. Usually these facts lack literary significance. It is inevitable that they will be there, and finding them is a task more typical of biographers than of critics. To this extent, any reflection on the life of Vargas Llosa in “Losvientos” interests me little. There are other reasons, but perhaps not too many, to read the latest story of the Peruvian Nobel Prize, in which an old and flatulent narrator with memory problems reflects on his life and the dystopian consequences of the civilization of the show. There are glimpses of the formal games that Vargas Llosa was so fond of – entire sections that repeat themselves due to the state of the narrator, for example – but these get lost among the cultural ramblings that somehow unlikely, occur in dreams. I would save the way the author deals with friendship, guilt, and the limits of death which, inevitably, are covered by old age.