(Madrid) The Spanish-Peruvian Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, 86, was hospitalized after contracting the coronavirus and his condition “is evolving favorably”, his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa announced on Friday.
Posted at 3:06 p.m.
“A few days ago, due to complications caused by the coronavirus, he was admitted to a clinic in Madrid,” the writer’s son wrote on Twitter. “Thanks to the treatment, his condition is changing favorably,” he added.
“We thank him and his family for all the affection shown to us and we ask the press to respect his privacy,” concluded this message signed by the three children of the writer, Alvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana.
The Peruvian author, naturalized Spanish in 1993, had just presented his latest work at the beginning of April, The calm gaze (by Pérez Galdos)an essay on the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdos (1843-1920).
He was to attend next week the presentation of a biography of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Quixote, by Santiago Muñoz Machado, an event which has been postponed.
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Vargas Llosa is the last representative of the generation of Latin American writers known as the “Boom” to which also belonged the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Argentinian Julio Cortazar or the Mexican Carlos Fuentes.
“Dreamers by nature”
“We Latin Americans are dreamers by nature and find it difficult to differentiate the real world from fiction. That’s why we have such good musicians, poets, painters and writers, and so many horrible, mediocre leaders,” he said in 2010, shortly before receiving the Nobel.
Admired for his description of social realities, but criticized by South American intellectual circles for his conservative positions, translated into thirty languages, Vargas Llosa, Francophile, was the first foreign writer to enter the prestigious French collection during his lifetime. de la Pléiade in 2016, the year of his 80th birthday.
Born in Arequipa in southern Peru on March 28, 1936 into a middle-class family, Vargas Llosa was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents in Bolivia and then Peru. After studying at the Military Academy in Lima, he obtained a degree in literature and took his first steps in journalism.
He then moved to Paris in the early 1960s, “decisive” years, he wrote in the foreword to his works published in the Pléiade.
This is where the author of The perpetual orgy — essay on the profession of writer through Madame Bovary — wrote his first novels. He says that “it was thanks to Flaubert” that he learned the working method that suited him and to become “the writer he wanted to be”.
It was also in Paris – where Vargas Llosa was a translator, Spanish teacher or journalist at Agence France-Presse – that he married his aunt by marriage Julia Urquidi, ten years his senior, who would later inspire to the author Aunt Julia and the Scribouillard.
A few years later, he separated from Julia Urquidi and married his first cousin and niece of his ex-wife, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children and remained 50 years.
His literary career took off in 1959 with his first collection of short stories, the bosses. Success comes with The city and the dogs (1963) then The green house (1966) and consolidates with Conversation at the Cathedral (1969).
follow Pantaleón and the visitors, The end of the world war or The fish in the watermemoirs retracing in particular his electoral campaign for the Peruvian presidential election of 1990. The author then proclaims his intention to continue writing until his last days.