Conversation at Princeton

August 1, 2022

In 2015, Vargas Llosa taught a course at Princeton with Rub�n Gallo, using five of his books--Conversation in the Cathedral, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, A Fish in the Water, and The Feast of the Goat--to clarify the theory of the novel and the relationship among journalism, politics, and literature. This chronicle of the course reflects the comments of both teachers and students. With a 10,000-copy first printing.

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October 31, 2022
A 2015 seminar co-taught by Peruvian author Llosa and Princeton professor Gallo comes to the page in this fascinating volume. The seminar, on politics and literature, sees Gallo prompt in-depth personal reflections and considered opinions from the novelist. Llosa recalls his early days working as a journalist (“It helped me to discover the reality of my country”), outlines his literary influences (“Faulkner, but also Dos Passos”), and considers the challenges of translation (“The meaning of that word is very dependent on who says it, to whom it is being said, and the tone with which it is said”). Especially vivid is the chapter on his 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat, about in which Llosa outlines the novel’s inspiration, the research he did for it, and his writing process. Students occasionally interject with questions, and insightful anecdotes about the novelist’s process (“I wrote episodes here and there first, until I found the structure,” he notes of Conversation in The Cathedral) and political perspective (“No country, no matter how advanced it is, is completely immune to a dictatorship”) abound. Llosa’s readers will appreciate this peek behind the curtain.

January 1, 2023
The celebrated Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa talks literature with students and faculty, offering insights into his creative process and "director's cut" commentary on his greatest hits. Collected after a busy semester at Princeton University, the interviews address a wide range of literary topics. Why do some novels fade, but others seem timeless? What makes for a good translation? What is the difference between literary and journalistic truth? Turning to his own works, Vargas Llosa shares backstories: the political pessimism he felt while writing his groundbreaking 1969 novel, Conversation in the Cathedral; the melancholy behind The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984); the melding of literature and politics in A Fish in the Water (1993), written following his failed run for the Peruvian presidency. Despite the warmth and safety of his Princeton surroundings, Vargas Llosa voices concern about troubling trends. The attacks at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo loom large. Throughout, the Nobel laureate reveals a sharp intellect that seems most comfortable in the liminal spaces between the contrasting environments of fiction and journalism, Europe and South America, politics and poetics.

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Starred review from November 15, 2022
Conversations on politics and writing with the 2010 Nobel laureate in literature. After he joined the Princeton faculty in 2002, Gallo met Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) when the latter spoke at the university about his essay on Les Mis�rables. When Gallo then became director of the Latin American studies program, he invited Vargas Llosa to spend several semesters teaching there. Gallo has since gone through 50 hours of recordings and notes on the seminars he and Vargas Llosa conducted and has collected that information in this magnificent book. In the first chapters, Vargas Llosa discusses "the effect of the great political events of the twentieth century on literature," followed by his thoughts on the role of journalism in his maturity as a writer. The bulk of the book consists of long discussions of five Vargas Llosa works: the novels Conversation in the Cathedral, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, and The Feast of the Goat; and A Fish in the Water, a hybrid that chronicles Vargas Llosa's 1990 presidential campaign in his native Peru and a memoir of his youth. The book concludes with a spirited discussion on "the role of the intellectual in the face of the ever more real threat of terrorism." Many thoughtful questions from Gallo and his students elicit provocative answers on an appealing variety of topics, including the perniciousness of dictatorships, the scourge and popularity of yellow journalism ("there is public pressure for journalism to also be entertainment"), and Vargas Llosa's approach to writing (he uses "hidden details" that "hide the story's main event," a technique he learned from reading Hemingway). The result is a treasure trove of literary advice and political analysis. Vargas Llosa also offers relevant warnings on the ways in which democratic societies can corrode into authoritarianism, as when he notes the ease with which "truths become lies, and lies become truths." An indispensable volume for fans of Vargas Llosa, Latin American literature, and the art of great writing.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022

Two books from Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa is cause for celebration. Call attempts to do for liberal thought what Edmund Wilson did for socialism in 1940's To the Finland Station; in separate essays, he traces the evolution of liberal doctrine from 18th-century Adam Smith through six 20th-century writers--Ortega y Gasset, Hayek, Popper, Aron, Berlin, and Revel. They're not the only thinkers he could have chosen to examine, but they're the ones who most directly influenced him. When Vargas Llosa was 12, Peru's president, a relative of his family, was overthrown, and Peru slid from democracy into dictatorship. The author emerged convinced that the root enemy of free society was suppression of speech. He started college a Sartrean and was an early enthusiast of the Cuban revolution but became disillusioned as he witnessed injustices that took place there. He eventually found that he could no longer tolerate Sartre's kneejerk support of communism. The best essay in this book is on Isaiah Berlin, who argued that humans hold ideals that don't fit together; they have to work out ways to accommodate them through compromise and tolerance of difference. Conversations is an editing of classroom discussions on four of the author's novels and his memoir in a seminar conducted in tandem by Vargas Llosa and Princeton professor of Spanish literature and language Rub�n Gallo. What constitutes a novel, and what role do novels play in our thinking and acting? The discussion bristles with sidebars: the constraints of journalism vs. fiction; why Sartre's novels no longer interest; censorship's effects on action; and how Vargas Llosa conceives his characters, researches stories, and structures his complicated back-and-forth narratives. The books on display run from Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) to The Feast of the Goat (2001), a memoir of his failed run for president of Peru. Throughout, Vargas Llosa comes across as gracious, self-aware, and modest. VERDICT Neither book will replace the author's landmark novels, but they enrich our appreciation for this great writer. Written in approachable style, they should appeal to all serious book lovers, not just academics.--David Keymer

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