Yesterday, I received I Gave You My Silence, the new novel by Nobel Prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa died last year; this is his final work, published posthumously.
When I saw the notice that it was being published. My mind moved back in time, some 40 years, to 1986. I was in a master of liberal arts program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I signed up for a fall seminar – The Latin American Novel. We would be reading novels by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Carlos Fuentes, among others. The reading syllabus was challenging.
I don’t recall why I signed up for that particular course; others were available. My total reading experience in the Latin American novel was limited to one book – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps that was the reason; Latin America has a vast literature, and I’d read very little of it.
We started with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then we turned to a Peruvian writer, Vargas Llosa. The book we read was The Green House, which I found myself fascinated by. A few weeks later, I was in Kansas City for a conference related to work, and one night I found myself in a bookstore, where I spotted Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. I was more than fascinated; it’s an incredible story based on historical fact, an Amazonian rebellion in Brazil.
That same fall, our professor hosted Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa for campus visits and speeches. Our class got to see both writers up close and personal. By 1986, the writers, who both had started out on the political left, had diverged. Garcia Marquez remained on the left. Vargas Llosa had moved to a more conservative position; he would later run for president of Peru. (He lost.)
Our research paper for the course involved a literary analysis of any Latin American novel. We had a considerable number of writers and works to choose from. For some unknown reason, I decided to tackle Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral. It’s likely his most difficult and least accessible work. It’s a big story – 600+ pages. Set in Peru in the 1950s, it’s a story of people and relationships set against the dictatorship of the time.
I read the first 125 pages and thought I would die if I had to finish it. The most pressing problem was that I couldn’t follow it. Was this one story? Four stories? It seemed to move all over the place. I almost gave it up to work on another book when something clicked. I remembered how deeply structured Vargas Llosa’s books are. I knew if I could figure out the structure, I might grasp the novel.
I did, finally. When I saw it, I couldn’t believe how obvious it was.
We had to present our papers in class. When I finished my presentation, the professor smiled. “You got it,” he said. “You got exactly what this book is about.”
I still rate it as one of the most difficult books I’ve read. I also rate as one of the best books I’ve read. Once you figure out the structure, it’s an amazing story. (I think Vargas Llosa, like many of the Latin American “Magic Realism” authors, tried to out-Faulkner William Faulkner; Faulkner was certainly a major influence on them.)
The books Vargas Llosa published after Conversation in the Cathedral were almost all generally shorter. He definitely wrote shorter books as he got older. This new one is 246 pages.
He changed my understanding of literature. He showed what imagination could do. The structure of my novel Brookhaven, if not a literal descendant of Conversation in the Cathedral, was certainly influenced by it.
Yeah, I’m a fan.
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