An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa
RLW: Has the Nobel Prize affected your work?
MVLL: The Nobel Prize is very flattering but it has not made me a better writer or a worse writer. It has made me a more public figure. Sometimes this is uncomfortable or distracting. I have always had a certain discipline for my work and since the prize, occasionally, for the first time in my life, I have not been able to maintain my writing discipline.
RLW: This is the first time we have met in Madrid. Do you live here in Madrid to keep your contact with the Spanish language?
MVLL: No, not really. I have written well in Spanish living in France and England, and sometimes those other languages provide an interesting and useful contrast with the language of my writing in Spanish. Living in another language in your daily life, you live more in your own language; I discover subtleties of my own language. Madrid is a place where my wife, Patricia, and I like to live; it is very comfortable for us. We used to come here and stay in hotels, but ten or twelve years ago we moved to Madrid. For me, Madrid is above all a place to work. I start writing early in the morning, which is my most creative period of the day.
RLW: Tell me more about this creative period. What time do you usually start working?
MVLL: It depends. For example, this morning I was working at 5:30 a.m. After that early morning work, Patricia and I go for a walk on a set route nearby around downtown Madrid here, usually for an hour. We think it is a nice walk, a “bonito paseo.” This walk is really important, for this is when I plan my day’s work. We stroll through a couple of nearby parks. When we get back home, I take a shower and always read the newspapers. Around 10:00 or 10:30 a.m., I go back to the writing until 2:00 p.m. This is my work for the day here at home. After that, I like to go out to the cafés of Madrid and do the less creative work: editing, reading, rereading, and the like. I used to go a lot to the Café Central, but since the Nobel Prize, I have had to start hiding out in less conspicuous places. I continue going a lot to the Biblioteca Nacional, which, as you know, has always been one of my favorite places to work. I work until around 6:00 p.m., and then I don’t work in the evening. We go out to the theaters, see film, and the like.
RLW: Let’s talk about your recent work. Your novels of the twenty-first century—La fiesta del Chivo, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, El sueño del celta—all take place in an international setting rather than exclusively Peru. Is that a self-conscious plan?
MVLL: Not really, but I think I consider myself a citizen of the world, so the settings can be anywhere without a self-conscious plan to do that.
RLW: What was your starting point for El sueño del celta?
MVLL: Actually, I was reading Joseph Conrad’s biography of Roger Casement at the time I was still writing that novel that took me a long time, The Way to Paradise, not for my work on that novel, but out of my personal interest in Conrad. In reading Conrad, I discovered the world of Africa. Casement opened Conrad’s eyes to what was happening in Africa. I became intrigued with the figure of Casement, who was a fascinating man. I began reading more about Casement and, as happens with my novels, this reading and further research led me into the novel El sueño del celta. It is the world of Christian civilization, of progress, of barbarism. And Roger Casement confronts the truth: all of this was really about greed, lies, avarice, and, above all, the exploitation of the natives. In reality, what this Colonialism was about was a saqueo—a stealing of resources. Casement was a pioneer, a man of great merit, of great courage. When he began his campaign in Africa, he was a true pioneer. And in this sense he was like the person on whom I had based the previous novel, Flora Tristán. Knowing Casement allowed Conrad to write Heart of Darkness. Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness because of Casement, to a large degree thanks to Casement. Back then, when I was beginning to read about Casement, I was just looking at him out of curiosity, and then I realized that I had a novel. As I was working on some theater projects and was finishing The Way to Paradise, I began writing El sueño del celta. And even though it was a highly researched novel, it was still basically a work of imagination.
RLW: In your research for this project, did you actually read Casement’s diaries?
MVLL: Yes, of course, in London. I even read all the different versions of the diaries. In the early days, the different photocopies of these diaries were very contradictory, with the text of the diaries very changed from the original. In the early years of the existence of these diaries, the British authorities did not allow you to make photocopies of them. Since then, the British government has allowed researchers to work on the editions of these diaries. Now, in the last twenty years, the editions are more reliable.
RLW: Were you interested in the fact that Roger Casement himself was so contradictory?
MVLL: Absolutely. That interested me a lot. Besides, it interested me that he also went to the Peruvian Amazon, that he had documented Julio César Arana, a novelistic character in himself.
RLW: From what I’ve read, apparently you believe his sex life as described in the diaries is fantasy. Is that how you see it?
MVLL: Yes. I don’t think there was time for the British secret service to falsify his diaries. I think they were his. They would have needed years to do the falsification. But I don’t believe that he actually lived what he says what he lived, what he describes in the diaries. Casement lived in a Victorian world in which he would have gone to jail for that about which he wrote. But he was an educated man, a very proper diplomat, a man who respected institutions and the law. Consequently, I believe that he used the diaries to live what he could not have lived, what he would have liked to have lived. Above all, the diaries were written in a very vulgar language and this is one of the things that is most shocking. They give the impression that he lived a life that he could not have lived. They were beyond the realm of reality [fuera de la realidad]. All the reports, on the other hand, describe him as a very proper person who used very refined language. Nevertheless, he describes quite exaggerated sexual activity that he never could have carried out.
RLW: In El sueño del celta, for the first time, you have descriptions of gay sex.
MVLL: Aren’t there gays in my other novels?
RLW: Well, you have the gay father of Santiago Zavala in Conversation in The Cathedral, for example, but without descriptions. Was this some kind of a challenge for you, as a writer, now in the twenty-first century, to attempt to describe gay sex in detail?
MVLL: In El sueño del celta I had no choice really. I had to get there. It was central to the novel. I could not downplay or hide it.
RLW: As you know, critics tend to say your major works are the novels of the 1960s. In this book, I am arguing the contrary—that your novels of the twenty-first century are major ones, and perhaps even the major ones.
MVLL: What these critics say is unfair. These are lengthy, audacious novels [audaces] in the sense that they go beyond what I had done before, exploring fictional worlds in France, England, Ireland, and the Congo.
RLW: Would you say that with these novels and the work such as your book on Iraq that you are in the “European dialogue”? You seem to have broadened your field of vision. I know the Swedish academy considers U.S. writers to be isolated from the “big dialogue.”
MVLL: We now live in a period in which terms such as “an American,” “a Latin American,” or “a European” can no longer be considered isolated entities. So true, I have broadened my field of vision. Today, I believe, it is almost impossible not to be a citizen of the world.
RLW: You were saying earlier that The Way to Paradise took you a long time. I remember that you were talking about it back in the 1990s.
MVLL: Yes, The Way to Paradise took a long time. Although I had a certain basic familiarity with Flora Tristán and I had read her Peregrinaciones de una paria and some other things on her. Originally, the novel was just the story of Flora Tristán, but then I started seeing the similarities between the character of Flora Tristán and the personality of Paul Gauguin. I have always been interested in painting, in Gauguin, so I decided to include him in The Way to Paradise. I liked entering into the life of Gauguin.
RLW: Your research into this novel even included a trip to Tahiti, right?
MVLL: Yes, for two or three weeks. And even to the Islas Marquesas. It was a very interesting experience. I liked getting inside the secret world of Paul Gauguin. That world—the primitive world of Gauguin in Tahiti—explains a lot about the evolution of his painting.
RLW: Let’s finish the conversation with your newest, most recent literary exploration, poetry. You’ve talked about reading poetry during your presidential campaign in 1990 . . .
MVLL: Yes, indeed. I read Spanish Golden Age poetry daily as a literary exercise when I was living in the daily world of political discourse. Later, I would reread Homer in various translations, since I do not read classical Greek. It was a very moving experience. Afterwards, I wrote a poem to Homer. It is not a genre I have ever pursued for most of my life—since I was an adolescent—for I have always had a sense that the only good poetry is the very best poetry.