- Good evening and welcome to the first lecture
of the 2017 Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures,
a series co-sponsored by the International House
Global Voices project
and the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities.
Our esteemed guest, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa
will spend the next four Monday evenings
discussing his creative process
in a series entitled The Writer and His Demons.
But before Mr. Vargas Llosa comes to the stage,
allow me a few moments to touch on why he is here
not just as a guest of the University of Chicago,
but specifically as part
of the Berlin Family Lecture Series.
First, I want to thank Randy and Melvin Berlin
who are in attendance tonight
for their generosity in making this annual event a reality.
The Berlin Family Lectures were established in 2013
to bring to campus individuals
who are making fundamental contributions to the arts,
humanities and humanistic social sciences.
In addition to offering a series of lectures,
the visitors develops a book for publication
with the University of Chicago Press.
With my friends from UChicago Press sitting in front of me,
I should point out that the 2015 lectures
delivered by author Amitav Ghosh
were just published last fall by the UChicago Press as
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
We look forward to seeing Mr. Vargas Llosa's
lectures in print soon
preserving his words for generations to come.
The 2018 lectures I'm delighted to announce
will be delivered by the architect
and urban visionary Jeanne Gang
who is also in attendance tonight.
I invite all of you here to join us next year in April
and each year thereafter for a lecture series
that continually promises new ideas and fresh insights
into the condition of the human.
Now, what unites these diverse scholars
and makes these lectures so special?
I call your attention to the use of the present tense
in the mission statement of the lecture series.
Individuals who are making fundamental contributions
to the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences.
We invite scholars who are intellectually active,
who continue to create, continue to work
and continue to think deeply about
fundamental issues of common concern.
Humanistic inquiry in all its forms
is a process of reevaluation and reexamination.
There is also something special about a lecture series.
By asking each lecturer to speak in an extended format
it asks all of us, both speaker and audience,
to engage with arguments and ideas
over a long period of time.
I hope to see many of you in the audience again and again
over the next three weeks
as we take an intellectual journey with Mario Vargas Llosa.
For someone consumed with writing,
Mr. Vargas Llosa has spent considerable time
thinking about reading.
In a 1997 essay, Seeds of Dreams,
Vargas Llosa writes that every writer is firstly a reader
and to be a writer is also a different way
of continuing to read.
Reading and writing are acts of life
and living for Vargas Llosa.
I encourage all of you to read and reread
his 2010 Nobel Prize lecture entitled
In Praise of Reading and Fiction.
This wonderful love letter to reading and writing
also includes a call to recognize the utility
and necessity of literature.
It is not enough says Vargas Llosa
for literature to entertain or provide beauty.
It can and certainly does take us into dreamworlds
and show us the wonders of life.
But literature can also reveal new paths,
expose us to different ideas
and alert us to oppression and outmoded ways of thinking.
Like writing, Vargas Llosa writes,
reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.
The debate over the utility of literature
is the same one the humanities face.
How do the humanities fit into our world of big data,
fast moving information networks
and instant gratification?
In many ways, this lecture series was designed
to offer partial answers to this important question
for multiple disciplines.
What does a legal theorist have to say
about corruption and politics?
Why is it necessary for contemporary literature
to intervene in debates over global warming?
What is the relationship between an author and his works?
And what does this say about the process of creating art?
Each of these questions has been taken up
by past Berlin lecturers
and provides an answer for the need
for the humanities in our daily life.
Although I am up here to introduce our guest,
Mario Vargas Llosa,
most of you do not need to be enlightened
on his seven decade career and accomplishments.
It is an understatement to say
he fits the bill for the Berlin Family Lectures.
As you probably know, he is the recipient
of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature
and he is an accomplished novelist, essayist,
journalist, playwright, politician
and even professional actor making his stage debut
two years ago at the age of 78
for his play Tales of the Plague.
Perhaps he plays an instrument as well,
I haven't asked but I do know
that he spoke in Stockholm about his great love for music
especially of the 19th century.
He likens the craft of writing to that of composing music.
For him, structure including the working out of motives,
how they appear and disappear gives a work
whether musical or literary the possibility
of success or failure.
And his novels are of course among the classics
of the 20th century.
I can't list them all, there are 19 in total
but he will discuss four touchstone works
during this series.
The Time of the Hero from 1963,
Conversation in the Cathedral 1969,
The War of the End of the World from 1981
and the Feast of the Goat from 2000.
Over the next four Monday evenings
Mr. Vargas Llosa will discuss one of these novels
in the context of his demons
which he has described as the inescapable passions
arising from a writer's individual,
collective and cultural experiences.
Like you, I can't wait to hear more
from one of the true literary giants of the 20th century.
Please join me in welcoming Mario Vargas Llosa
who tonight will offer the first of four lectures
on The Writer and His Demons.
Thank you.
(audience clapping)
- Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you very much for this very generous presentation
and thank you to the University of Chicago
for inviting me to this prestigious institution,
and to the Berlin Family for sponsoring these lectures.
A writer cannot speak about his books
as a critic with the objectivity
and the impersonal perspective that a critic has.
A writer cannot separate the text
of the context of his books.
So in these lectures I'll probably speak much more about
the context than the text of these four novels of mine.
The first novel, La ciudad y los perros,
which was translated as The Time of the Hero,
I hated the title. (audience laughing)
It was imposed on me by the
literary editor of Grove Press
which was the publishing house
that published the book for the first time.
He didn't like city and dog,
so The City and the Dogs as I proposed him
and he said that this title was not catching enough.
He wanted a very catching title.
And so, he used Time of the Hero which I always hated.
Particularly because if there is a thesis in the novel
is that there are no heroes.
That the official heroes are very artificial creations
and that the real heroes are very discreet
and not publicly recognized.
Well anyway, I wrote this novel because
something happened to me.
This is something that I can say about all
novels, short stories and plays that I have written.
I have written stories because
I have had certain experiences
that for a mysterious reason remain in my memory
and become little by little obsessions,
recurrent obsessions that push me
to fantasize around these images,
that as I said, I don't know why
remaining my memory and become a very fertile
impulsions to fantasize about.
Well, the experience that is behind
The Time of the Hero was two years that I
spend in a military school in Lima
in 1950 and 1951.
The military school Leoncio Prado was a very
special kind of institution.
It was a military school, not a military academy
it was a school,
the last three years of the secondary school
which was put under the control of the military.
My father send me to this military school
because he thought that the military would cure me
of my literary vocation.
(audience laughing)
He had discovered that I wrote poems, short stories
and he became extremely worried.
He saw that the literary vocation was
a passport to failure in life,
that writers were Bohemians, marginal kind of people
are not very virile, you know?
He said, he thought that a military school
would be the best cure for this
extravagant kind of vocation which was literature.
And actually, these two years that I was in the
Leoncio Prado Military School
gave me the raw material for my first novel.
(audience laughing)
And in way I become contrary to what he thought
in the two years that I was in this military school
a professional writer.
A kind of professional writer because
as one of the characters of the novel,
Alberto, the poet is called by his comrades,
I wrote love letters for my comrades
and also erotic stories that I changed
with my friends by cigarettes.
(audience laughing)
To be two years in a military school was for me
a great adventure.
Since I learned how to read when I was five years old
I had been reading novels of adventures
and my infancy, my adolescence
was full of these fantastic stories
in which the characters had very extraordinary experiences
which in the real life nobody had.
And I wanted very bad one day to experience something
of the characters of this novel of Jules Verne,
of Alexandre Dumas that I read
with such pleasure in my youth.
Well, the Leoncio Prado Military School
was my great, great adventure when I was
13 and 14 years old.
The Leoncio Prado Military School
was a very special institution in Peru.
Was probably the only institution at that time in the '50s
that was a kind of
very objective representation of
what Peruvian society was at that time.
At that time Peru was a very structured society
in which each social class
was totally ignorant of what was
the kind of lie that other social classes have.
If you were a young
boy of a middle class
living in Lima in the coastal region of Peru,
you had a very distorted idea of what Peru was.
You didn't know that Peru was a very diverse society
with people of different origins and
you ignore the enormous inequalities
that were the major social characteristic of the country.
You ignore completely all the violence,
the contradictions and the enormous social problems
that the country experience.
I had probably the idea that Peru was
a white country of white people from European origin.
And that in a way we can say
a very civilized kind of society.
That was the idea that a middle class boy living in Lima
had of the country.
I discover entering the Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado
that Peru was a completely different kind of country,
that it was a country of white people,
of Indian people, of halbred people, Cholos
that was a country of black people,
of Chinese people, of Japanese people.
And that there were rich families
and there was a very large middle class
which was also divided in an upper middle class,
in a middle middle class, in a very low middle class.
And also, very poor, poor people which was probably
there in the military school
representing the largest Peruvian society.
Why was the Leoncio Prado the only institution
in which this complex and diverse society
was well-represented.
Because people send their sons
to the military school for different reasons.
Rich people of upper class people
send them like to a correctional
because they were very dificil to educate, to control
and they thought that a military school
would put them in the real
discipline world.
There were many, many young Peruvians
who wanted to become after military
and so they went to the Leoncio Prado
as a military preparation for being officers
in the navy, in the aviation, in the army.
And there were many poor Peruvians
who entered the military school
because the military school had a hundred grants every year
who permit people of very, very poor origin
enter the military school.
It was a reproduction of the Peruvian society
with all the prejudices,
rancors of every social group, you know?
And that gave this boarding school
a kind of violence that a boy from a middle class
ignored completely and discovered only there.
And it was a military school,
so the military imposed a system of life in which
physical force was the supreme value,
machismo, you know?
You have to be macho, you have to be physical,
aggressive in order to represent
what the military school wanted to make of the cadets.
I wasn't happy there but I am very grateful to my father
to have send me to the Leoncio Prado.
Because in these two years in which I was there
I discovered the real Peru,
the real country in which I was born.
And I discovered that this country was very, very different
of the country in which I thought I was living
when I was before the military school living in Miraflores.
Since I was there as a cadet
I thought one day I will write a book about this experience
because this experience is so different.
So different of the kind of life
that a young boy who lives in Miraflores
and who belongs to a family like mine can have.
Well, I must stop to say you something very important.
I discover writing this novel that I was a realist writer,
that my literary vocation push me to write
stories or novels which imitate reality,
which pretend to present an objective
description of what is life.
I had problems with my literary vocation.
Not the ideas of my father but I have moral problems.
I discovered when I was very young
the social problems, the political problems
and I said to myself, how can you be a writer
if you live in a country in which
very few people really read,
if the great majority of Peruvians
are completely out of literature?
The poor people because they are poor and they are ignorant
and the rich people because they are ignorant too,
and they don't pay any importance
to literature to culture.
Well, I dissipate all these doubts
when I entered the university
and I was impregnated with the
ideas of the French existentialist philosophers.
You know that France had had a great cultural influence
in Latin America in the past.
Not in our days but when I was young
French ideas, French writers, French thinkers
impregnated our cultural life.
And I was an avid reader of writers like Sartre,
like Camus, even the Christian existentialist Paul,
wait, I don't remember the name.
And particularly, reading Sartre
was for me extremely important.
Because what he said particularly in one of his books
Situation deux
qu'est-ce que c'est literature, What Literature Is.
It was so encouraging for a third world young
who wanted to be a writer.
What he said was literature is a way to participate
in historical changes.
Literature is not gratuitous.
Words are acts.
Writing poems, novels, short stories, plays,
you can participate in a very effective way
diffusing ideas that would be
the origin of social and economic
and cultural changes in your society.
The ideas of Sartre at that time were for me
extremely encouraging because
he convince you that with a literary vocation
you were not giving your...
You were not acting in a despective way
towards the social and economic
and political problems of your society.
No, literature, he said, was a way to participate
in a very, very effective way in changes.
Because the changes in their origin are always ideas
and there is no better way to
contaminate a society with new ideas like literature.
I was deeply convinced with this Sartre ideas
and I think my first novel, La ciudad y los perros,
is deeply impregnated with this ideas of Sartre.
It's a novel that wants to describe
through the cadets of the military,
Leoncio Prado Military School, a country.
A country in which the violence is so spread
particularly by the very diverse composition.
Cultural diversity, social diversity,
economic diversity, political diversity.
When I wrote the novel I wanted very much to present
this military school as a reproduction in small format
of the diversity of Peruvian society.
You have there cadets that are
coming from the very upper class like Alberto the poet,
or Arrospide the brigadier of the first company
in the school.
You have students who belong to middle middle classes
and lower middle classes like Arana the slave,
like the Jaguar who is also from a very middle class.
And then a lot of young students
who come from the fields.
Or they are Indians or they are black
or they are Chinese and Japanese
which at that time were the lower
and the poorer social classes in Peru.
This has changed a lot since
but at that time this configuration of the society was
very clearly marked and it was reproduced in the school.
I mentioned the ideas of Sartre
which were very useful for me when I wrote this novel
and I would like to mention also another writer
who was extremely, extremely important
for my literary vocation,
and also for the way in which I have written all my novels.
It was Flaubert.
I discovered Flaubert in 1958,
many years after I have had
the experience of the military school.
I was in Paris and I just a few days later my arrival
I bought Madame Bovary of Flaubert
and this book really changed my life.
What I discover in this fantastic novel
I discovered first that you could be a realist writer,
you could tell a story which was a
representation of the real world,
the world that we known through our experiences.
And at the same time be deeply fascinated
with the aesthetic aspect of literature,
the beauty, the harmony,
the elegance of writing a book
could be perfectly matched with a realist kind of vocation.
That is what Flaubert did in Madame Bovary.
He wrote a history which is very realistic.
There is nothing exceptional,
there is nothing that you could not recognize in real life.
And at the same time everything in Madame Bovary
is beautiful particularly the language.
He had this idea that the perfect description in a novel
is using the exact words, le mot juste.
The exact words
and that you know that he had
this idea that the perfect phrase
was something that had a musical coordination, harmony
and that the only way to prove
if you had achieved this in your phrases was
shouting what you had written.
And when I read Madame Bovary and I discovered that
you could be a realist writer
and at the same time be extremely preoccupied
for the aesthetic effect of literature,
the importance of language in literature.
I discovered the kind of writer that I wanted to be.
The Time of the Hero is a novel
which is realist but in which language
is extremely, extremely taken care of.
I wrote the language in a,
let's say, very fastidious, fastidious way
trying to applique the lessons of Flaubert.
Searching for the mot juste for the exact expression
without fioritures, without anything that could.
(phone ringing)
Sorry. (audience laughing)
I'm so sorry.
It happens to me all the time.
(audience laughing)
I think also I learn a technique, a way of writing,
writing this, my first novel
which is something that I have repeated
in all the novels that I have written.
I did three versions of the story.
The first one very chaotic, a kind of magma
in which I try to develop the story,
the facts, the characters repeating episodes,
and writing without much preoccupation for the
structure, the organization of the time
nor for the language.
It was a way. (phone rings)
Oh my god. (audience laughing)
It was a way to fight successfully
the kind of depression that I always experience
in the first versions of the stories that I write.
The first version is a fight against demoralization
because I find this conviction that the story will never,
will take off.
That the story would remain as a
wooden language, without life.
I try to have at least in a very primitive way the story
and this is the first version
which is for me the most difficult to write,
and as I said a fight against demoralization.
Then I always do a second version
in which I start to really enjoy and write there.
The second version for me is to find
the structure of the story,
the way in which time is organized.
And I don't want to talk now about Faulkner
because I shall do it in the next lecture.
But probably as important as Flaubert
was for me to discover Faulkner, Faulkner novels
when I was at the university.
Faulkner was the first writer that I read
with a piece of paper and a pen
trying to decifrate the structures that
he was able to organize, to inoculate in his stories
expectation, mystery, curiosity,
a way to hook the attention of the reader.
Well, the structure, the organization of time
particularly in the novel is what is my main preoccupation
in this second version of the novel.
At that time I was deeply disappointed
with the kind of literature that was,
the realist literature in Latin America.
Because these writers would seem to believe
that if they had very dramatic and powerful stories
they didn't have to worry about the formal aspects
of the book, of the story.
No preoccupation with the language
and no preoccupation with the organization of the time
which is never in a novel a reproduction of the real time.
When you are a writer you have,
when you write a novel you have to invent two things
which are extremely important.
Who is going to narrate the story, the narrator.
You can have one narrator,
you can have many kind of narrators.
Different narrators but you have to be a clear conscience
that you are using a narrator
which is always an invented character
even if it is invisible.
And another very important essential thing
you have to invent the organization of time.
The time in a novel is never the real time,
the chronological time in which we are immersed
is something that is an artifice,
is something very artificial.
We don't know that it's artificial when this
really effective and functional
and make you believe the story.
But the time is always an invention, a literary invention.
And usually, in this third version
for me what is important is
the elaboration of a chronological system
which made the story more persuasive
and can seduce and keep the attention of the reader.
What story tells Time of the Hero?
Well, the central argument is very simple.
A group of cadets of the 50 year,
the last year of the school steal an exam of chemistry
and one of the robbers of this exam is caught.
He's denounced by another cadet
and he's expelled in a very humiliating ceremony.
And then a few weeks after the cadet that denounced
the robber is killed in a military maneuvers
at the end of the week.
Was this a pure coincidence?
Was this a vengeance
because this group of robbers
discovers the cadet that had accused the,
well that is the mystery let's say that keeps
more or less moving the story.
But what is really important in the novel I think
is not this anecdote.
This kind of three layer
but the description of the life that the cadets invent
a kind of secret life which is ignore
not only by the families of the cadets
but also by the military, by the officers
who organize and control life in the institution.
This was for me the most interesting
aspect of the, of being a cadet in the military school.
The cadets we had a secret life in which
we reproduce distortion in a lot
the military life that the officers wanted to impose on us.
And in which all these values, the military values let's say
particularly machismo, discipline, order
was a kind of instrument that the cadets use
to express everything that they brought to the school,
the social prejudice, the racial prejudice.
All this violence that was the violence that
the Peruvian society produced
in the different families and all this was
part of the secret life that the cadets
had in the military school.
And what gave to the cadets the
enormous violence in which they live.
When I speak about violence
I am explaining my experience of the school,
afterwards many years after I was in the school
I have had conversations with comrades of the school.
And they had a very different idea.
They said what violence?
That was absolutely normal, normal kind of life.
Well but it was not for me.
It was a normal kind of life
for many, many Peruvian families
but not for the very privileged minority of people
in which I was part of it.
For me it was terrible what happened there
but for many, many cadets it was a normal life.
It was a kind of life that they had in their houses
and in their families.
One of the criticism that were done to my novel
when it was published,
it was that they were not let's say positive characters,
that all characters were negative, you know?
And I strongly rejected this criticism.
I think the novel was good,
received many, many just criticism but not that one.
Because I think there is a real hero in the novel
which is Lieutenant Gamboa.
Lieutenant Gamboa is a military which is there
because he had a military vocation
and he's a military that believe in reclamens,
in the, all the dispositions
that the army, that the military have created
to produce this kind of discipline, you know,
courageous and let's say
very patriotic kind of institution.
And he tries very much in the novel
for these ideas to be impressed in the real world.
But it's totally impossible
and it's totally impossible because
the military also have a kind of
rhetoric kind of life and the real life
which in many, many cases rejects
and distortion this rhetorical life in which
Gamboa and only himself try to reproduce in life.
He at the end because he try to be just,
because he try to be decent
and to act in following the reclamens is punished
and also rejected of the world of the military
and sent to a very isolated and very primitive garrison.
The novel had a very interesting story.
I wrote it as I said in Spain and France far from Peru
and this has been always the case of all my other novels.
I need to be away of the place in which
my novel is settled.
I feel more free to invent, to change things
that if I am in the same place
in which my novel is settled,
this has been always, although I do a lot of research
because I am a realist writer and I want to
describe the real cities, the real characters
in a way that is more or less similar
to what is the real world.
To fantasize the story I need to be far away.
I need to be distant of because that gives me
more freedom to distort things, to change things
in order to be more persuasive for the reader.
All of my novels have been written
far away from the place where the story is settled.
I always thought that choosing a literary vocation
I would be condemned to be,
to have a kind of marginal life
because that was the case of all Peruvian writers
that I had met in my youth, you know?
Writing was a kind of marginal activity
in the Peru of the '50s.
It's not the case now,
things have changed a lot for the better fortunately
but at that time to be a writer was to be really
a march of the main life,
the main current of life in the country.
I thought I would organize my life doing
journalism, teaching but literature would be important
but literature is not nutritive for a Peruvian writer.
I never could consecrate my life only for writing.
But something happened when the novel was published.
It won a literary prize in Spain
(speaks in foreign language)
and so the book had a certain publicity.
But to my great surprise
I discovered one day that the military in Peru had
read the book and that they were furious with the novel.
They considered that the novel was an act of treason
to the country and they have burned
in the military school Leoncio Prado
many, many exemplaries of the novel,
and this of course was a great publicity for the book.
(audience laughing)
So much publicity that until now I am wondering
if the success of the novel was because of the novel
or it was because of the military, you know,
that burned the book but they don't prohibit it.
Probably they didn't know
that you could prohibit the book, you know?
(audience laughing)
And so, the novel become very,
well it was a kind of best seller in Peru
and to my great, great surprise
I discovered that the book would be
translated to other languages
and that I was interviewed by journalists,
and I couldn't believe this kind of extraordinary adventure
that the adventure of the Leoncio Prado
was producing in my life.
I want to tell you a very interesting anecdote
that happened with the novel.
You would believe that a writer has the last word
about what he has written.
This is not true.
This is not true.
I don't think a writer has the necessary distance
with what he has written
to know exactly the value of his books.
And I don't think this is only my case.
I think it's the case of many, many writers
who don't really know what they have done.
They may believe if they are vanidosos, you know,
that they have succeed writing a master work
or that they can feel that they,
the novel was a defeat, a moral defeat,
a literary defeat because it didn't reach
what he wanted to achieve with this book.
But they never had the necessary perspective,
the necessary objectivity to evaluate in a just proportion
the quality or the lack of quality of his books.
Well, as I told you,
there is a question in the novel
which the novel doesn't answer
because it wants the reader to discover
and to decide for himself.
Is the Jaguar the killer of the slave
because he knew that the slave
denounced the serrano Cava
and it was the Jaguar that killed in the maneuvers
to the slave?
Or as the military want to believe it was an accident,
a very sad accident that,
which was responsible the same cadet
who was killed because of this.
As I told you, to my surprise
the novel was translated to different languages
after the biggest scandal
that the military produced in Peru.
And of course I was very happy that my novel
was translated into French.
At that time I was still a Frenchicized writer.
I had resigned myself to not being a French writer.
I discover in Paris that I was a Latin American.
Alas, you know?
But I was very proud to discover that I was Latin American
because at that time many Latin American writers
went to Paris, I met them,
I discovered that in Latin America
there was a very rich and very creative literature.
Although it was not very realist,
it was more the magic realism, the fantastic literature
but with very great writers.
Garcia Marquez, Borges, Cortazar, Rulfo, well.
But still my love for French literature was enormous
and I was so happy that my book
would be translated into French.
I went to visit the director of a Gallimard
Collection of Latin American Literature
which was a very well-known French critic, Roger Caillois.
He was at that time working in the UNESCO
so I asked for an interview
and he received me very kind in his office in UNESCO.
And I said, well I am deeply grateful
because for me it's a great honor to be translated
and the book to appear in Gallimard
which is so prestigious publishing house.
And he was also very kind and he told me,
"Well, I read your book.
"It's a very interesting book."
And he said to me, "You know what I have liked very much
in La ciudad y los perros that the Jaguar at the end
without having committed the crime
accuses himself of being the criminal
only to recover the popularity that he had lost
among his comrades."
And I told him, well but that's.
(audience laughing)
But the Jaguar is the killer of the slave.
(audience laughing)
And he told me, "What?
(audience laughing)
"You haven't understood the novel that you have written."
(audience laughing) And this is quite normal.
He told me, "This is quite normal, you know?
Writers don't know what they have done.
Of course, this is completely stupid what you are selling.
That would be a very stupid kind of thing
if he kills the by vengeance.
No, what is very subtle, subtle
is this very secret kind of sacrifice
that he commits inventing that he's a criminal
only to recover the leadership that he had lost.
You understand?"
And I say, "Of course, I understand."
(audience laughing)
And since then when I have asked but who killed the?
I said, "Maybe he didn't kill him, you know?
"Maybe he invented these."
(audience laughing)
Well, writers don't have the last word about that,
what they write.
Because of this lecture I have reread
something of the English translation.
I think it's a good translation
but that there is something that is lost
in the translation unfortunately.
Difference among social classes
in many countries like in Peru
is something that is represented in the way he speak,
the different classes.
And I remember very much that that was one of the things
that impress me more when I enter
the military school Leoncio Prado.
How the way in way in which I spoke the Spanish
was so different from the way in which
let's say a middle class Peruvian Cholo
would speak the Spanish.
He would use words that I would never use myself
and this was not only the different vocabulary,
it was also the music.
How the music changes
in the different social classes.
And I was not thinking only in characters of
different regions, no.
Within Lima itself, the way in which Spanish was spoken
but a young boy of a middle class,
young boy of the marginals of the city
was very, very different.
You lost a lot and I am sure they
also lost a lot listen me.
And I try to reproduce very carefully in the novel
these different ways in which
the students and even the military speak the Spanish.
This I think is lost in probably not only
in the English translation
but in other translations of the novel.
I would like to add something before I finish
about the idea of the time.
I discovered writing this novel the importance of the time.
The fictitious time, the artificial time
that there is in all the novels.
Time is in real life something that
is exactly the same for everybody
but in a novel you cannot reproduce this kind of time.
You have to manipulate the time
in order to produce expectation, curiosity,
to hook the attention of the reader.
And so I discovered that you had to invent time
exactly as you invent a narrator to tell a story.
And this discovery was particularly
in the last episode of the novel.
The last episode of the novel Jaguar
who after being a kind of
devil in the school
has finished as a bank employee,
discover one day in the streets many, many years
after the story of the novel, the main story of the novel,
his friend of youth Skinny Higueras
who was a robber, a criminal.
And they were very good friends when he was young.
And I wanted in a way to have a contrast
with another encounter that the Jaguar has done
at the end of the novel with the girl
to whom he was in love when he was very young.
And experimenting with different ways in which
these two encounters would be united,
I suddenly discovered that if I did just one narration
of these two encounters
organizing the different, these encounters
in different places and different times
in a way in which it wouldn't be confusion
because the silences in each of the encounters
will be fill by the dialog in the other encounters.
In such a way that since the beginning
the reader could be interested
in spite of the fact that this kind of construction
was not a realist one but was very, very artificial.
I could tell an episode in a very different way
and impregnate this episode with mystery.
Well, I want to mention this because
this is a discovery that helped me very, very much
in the other novels that I have written
as you will see in the next lectures.
Well, I thank you very much for your attention
and it will be until
next Monday. (audience applauding)
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