His breakthrough book was deemed too inflammatory to be taught in my school, and was burned by authorities, but this Peruvian firebrand would reveal himself to be a man of contradictions
The early 1960s was, for my generation in Argentina, an age of discovery when, in our mid-teens, we learned about sex, metaphysics, the Beatles, Ezra Pound, Che Guevara, Fellini’s films, and the new literature of Latin America. In the bookstore around the corner from my school, there began to appear novels with black-and-white photographs on the dust jackets whose Spanish-language authors, while acknowledging
Borges
as the
fons
et origo
of all literary endeavours, attempted to find in the 19th-century European realists new ways to depict the troubled reality of Spain and South America.
One of those novels was La Ciudad y los Perros (The City and the Dogs, oddly translated into English as The Time of the Hero) by a young, unknown Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who, in 1962, had won the recently created Premio Biblioteca Breve in Spain. Our literature teacher, while encouraging us to explore the transgressive fields of surrealism and fantastic fiction, thought that this novel was too extreme for adolescent imaginations: too much youthful violence; too much murky sex; too much questioning of authority. There had been nothing like it in Spanish-language fiction before. A fierce indictment of Peru’s military system, incandescent with rage against the hypocrisy of the established order as mirrored in Lima’s most prestigious military academy (which the author had attended), it was also the chronicle of an adolescent rite of passage into the ranks of the commanding patriarchy. The book so incensed the Peruvian authorities that, in the tradition of the city’s founding fathers, an
auto-da-f
é
was ordered and dozens of copies were burned in the academy’s courtyard. At the very start of what was labelled by canny publishers as the “boom” of Latin-American literature, Vargas Llosa’s book was recognised as a modern subversive classic.
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