Críticas Magazine

Adriana V. Lopez

The romantic, the anti-realist, and the tough guy
June 18, 2008

I simply love when great artists gather at the same table to wax big about their craft. And when they’re Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa and Spains’ Javier Marías and Arturo Pérez Reverte, you’re bound to get some juicy anecdotes and truisms about writing to store away. This past week El Pais’ culture reporter Juan Cruz documented this literary powwow entitled “Lecciones y escritores” organized by the Fundacion Santillana and the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo. Here are some of my favorite sound bites: Mario Vargas Llosa told the story about how in his adolescence his mother had once taken away from him a copy of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. We all know that when parents take away something from us, it’s probably very good. So he says he looked for it again and kept it on his night table during his adolescence. He said it taught him about life’s urgencies. You can also read about this in his autobiography El pez en el agua (A Fish in the Water). So it would seem that a romantic like Vargas Llosa might urgently choose the labors of love over the labors of writing later on as an adult. Not so. According to his biographer Armas Marcelo, when Vargas Llosa was staying with a friend in Paris after publishing La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs) the door bell rang in the dead silence of the night. The friend said that before that, all he had heard was Vargas Llosa banging away at the typewriter. The friend said that the typewriter stopped after the ring and surely a woman had walked in and that the sound of the typewriter continued again. It stopped again only when Vargas Llosa’s voice was heard saying, “What are you doing naked? You’re going to freeze!” Then the sound of the typewriter continued…. Javier Marías prefers reading fiction over learning about reality. He said, “The only way of telling something that really happened is through the elegant and decent disguise of invention.” The author of the recent Tu rostro mañana , a three-volume trilogy with 1,600 pages, evidently has a lot of "truth masking" to tell. He went on to say: “Reality is a dreadful novelist.” And finally there’s Arturo Pérez Reverte who is recognized for his best selling novels about heroes and battles. He approaches writing with the utmost practicality: He works eight to ten hours daily with only one method in mind in writing a novel: To tell a story starting with A to get to C. which is the outcome, but passing through B, which is the junction. “Up until now, I haven’t found a better method. You have to keep up the writing, place your periods and commas and not complain afterwards ‘that the world doesn’t get me.’” Oh yes, even amongst artists, there’s always the tough guy in the crowd.

Here they come, walking down the street: (from l-r) Javier Marías, Mario Vargas Llosa and Arturo Pérez Reverte this week.

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on June 18, 2008 | Comments (0)