Lima, March 8. The Peruvian government announced this Wednesday by surprise that it would award in the coming hours the Grand Collar of the Order of the Sun, the highest national distinction, to the Hispano-Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, a month after his incorporation into France. Academy.
Without notice, the presidential office announced shortly before 6:00 p.m. (23:00 GMT) that the ceremony would take place at the Government Palace, located in the historic center of Lima, at 8:00 p.m. (01:00 GMT). .
At that time, Vargas Llosa should receive the Grand Collar of the oldest order in America, one of the most prestigious distinctions granted by the Peruvian State to reward exceptional citizens for their extraordinary services to the country in areas such as the arts, letters, culture and politics.
Vargas Llosa made history last February by joining the French Academy, the institution responsible for ensuring the purity of Molière’s language, at a solemn ceremony in Paris, during which he assured that “the novel will save democracy or it will lose with it and it will be gone.”
“Let me now present my theory, which is worth what it is worth, a little more and, no doubt, a little less, than so many others circulating in our age of literary theories. The novel will save democracy or spoil it with it and disappear,” the Nobel laureate said in 2010.
The act was welcomed by the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it was only eleven days later that the country’s president, Dina Boluarte, made public her letter of congratulations to the writer.
The election of Vargas Llosa, announced in 2021 to fill the 18th seat left vacant by the philosopher Michel Serres when he died in 2019, had sparked controversy for having violated two major canons of the French Academy: not to elect anyone more 75 years old (currently the writer from Arequipa is 86 years old) and being an author who does not originally write in French.
Vargas Llosa, however, reaffirmed during the ceremony his links with France, with its language and especially with authors like Gustave Flaubert. Without them, he says, he would not have become the writer he is today.
Those who are part of the Academy are known as the “immortals” and form an exclusive club that now hosts its first South American. They owe their nickname to the motto of the seal that Cardinal Richelieu gave to the institution he founded in 1635: “To immortality”.
The Hispano-Peruvian writer maintains a link with his native country, of which he aspired to the presidency in 1990, when he was beaten by Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).
After the elections, he moved to Madrid, because the Fujimori government threatened to withdraw his Peruvian nationality and, to prevent him from becoming stateless, Spain granted him nationality by letter of naturalization.
His ties to Peruvian politics have kept him closely tied to Peru and, in the 2021 presidential elections, led him to unexpectedly support Keiko Fujimori (Alberto Fujimori’s daughter) against Pedro Castillo. ECE
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