Interview: Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa—Interviewed by Lois Parkinson Zamora

Vargas Llosa Speaks about Dictator Novels, Globalization, the Novel as Reverse Striptease. . .

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa was in Houston, Texas, on November 11, 2002, to read from his recently translated novel, The Feast of the Goat. His appearance was part of the Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, sponsored by Imprint, Inc., the community support group of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. After the reading, Lois Parkinson Zamora, professor of comparative literature at the University of Houston, joined Mr. Vargas Llosa on stage for the following conversation.

Zamora: The Feast of the Goat can be said to belong to a group of powerful Latin American novels that comprise a particularly Latin American genre, the “dictator novel.” In fact, there is an anecdote that circulates—I think the source is Carlos Fuentes—that tells of a meeting in the early 60s of young writers from several countries in Latin America. The anecdote goes that they were discussing the subjects that compelled then, and they realized that one of the many things they had in common was the experience of dictatorship. Each of these young writers proposed to write a “dictator novel,” and whether this story is true or not—maybe you can tell us—the fact is that we now have a wonderful group of such novels: Alejo Capentier’s Recurso del metodo (translated as Reasons of State),Carlos Fuentes’ Terra nostra, Augusto Roa Bastos’ Yo el supremo (I the Supreme), Garcia Marquez’s El otono del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) and of course the earliest example of the mode, which predates this supposed meeting by twenty years, Miguel Angel Asturias’ El senor president. I wonder if you’d comment on The Feast of the Goat in terms of the Latin American literary tradition—this Latin American use of the Dictator-as-Archetype.

Vargas Llosa: Let me say a word about this anecdote. It’s half true. It was in the mid-sixties—I think the idea was Carlos Fuentes’. He said, “Why don’t we write a book of short stories in which each of us will write about our own dictator. Fuentes would write a book of short stories in which each of us will write about our own dictator.” Fuentes would write a short story about Santana; Garcia Marquez    about . . . about . . .  who was Garcia Marquez’s dictator? (Someone from the audience shouts “Rojas Pinilla.”) Yes! Yes! Thank you very much! Rojas Pinilla. (laughter) My dictator was Sanchez Cerro or perhaps Odrio, Roa Bastos’ dictator was Dr. Francia, Carpentier’s was Batista, and so on. I don’t know why this project dissolved and disappeared; we were very enthusiastic about it at the beginning. But you are right that slowly, novels about dictators began to appear, and it may have been this project that was their source.

Zamora: The existence of the dictator novels suggests the special relation of politics and literature in Latin America. Latin American novelists are often political commentators as well as writers of fiction—indeed; they sometimes run for high political office. (laughter) Would you comment on this relation of politics and literature?

Vargas Llosa: In Latin America, it was much more difficult to be indifferent to politics in the past than it is now. All of our problems—dictatorship, authoritarian regimes, censorship, no free press, no free criticism—gave rise to literary writing. This is the reason that writers in Latin America were involved in political activities. And when I was young and just starting to write, there was also the idea (and I think it was not just in Latin America but in many parts of the world (that through literature you could fight against wrong-doing, against evil in social, political and moral arenas—those were the years of “committed literature”—literature comprometida. From France in particular came the ideas of Sartre and Camus that a writer had the moral obligation to fight for good causes and, of course, one of the good causes for Latin American writers was the fight against dictators. Dictators were all over the continent. Trujillo was the most extreme example but there were many more, and I think that this is one of the reason that politics has entered so much into literary activity in Latin America. But contemporary Latin American writers, I believe, are less committed to political cause than we were.

Zamora: The Feast of the Goat would certainly be an exception to the current trend then, in the sense that this novel continues the tradition of political commitment with which you began your career, and which you’ve pursued over the years. In contrast to the U.S. and Europe, the social and political function of literature and, consequently, the social and political role of the writer, continue to operate in Latin America.

Vargas Llosa: Yes, yes, of course. The Romantic tradition that artists and writers, because they are creators, because they move in the world of ideas, can help people to face the problems of society—this tradition is still strongly rooted in Latin America. Let me add that this conception of the writer as the conscience of society may seem naïve but behind this naivety there is a truth, which is that literature is not only entertainment but also something far more. It is entertainment, of course, great entertainment; but literature can also help people to live, and open their eyes to things that they might not discover otherwise. I think that good literature develops a critical mind, a critical sensibility. Literature presents a perfect artifact—a perfect society within the literary work—to confront the real world, which is always imperfect. This makes literature a critical instrument in historical, social and political terms, and this perception may have produced the myth, so alive in Latin America, of the writer as the conscience of his time, his society.

Zamora: Do you think there are dangers in this myth?

Vargas Llosa: The major risk is that the writer takes him or herself too seriously, thinking that he or she has answers for everything. If you believe that, you are finished as a writer.

Zamora: This complex relation of politics and literature may explain the fact that virtually all of Latin American novelists are also journalists. It may also explain why the essay as a genre has such vitality in Latin America.

Vargas Llosa: Journalism and literature have always been close in Latin America. In my case, I have received from my journalistic experience a lot of material to write about; without the journalism that I have practiced since I was young, I wouldn’t have written at least half of my novels. The raw material for many of my novels has come from experiences that I had working as a journalist.

Zamora: In The Feast of the Goat, you expose in relentless detail the relations of political power to sex and violence. This triangulation of sex, violence and power is the motor that drives you character—and you characterization—of Trujillo, and there are times in the novel when this triangle seems to take on a life of its own—seems to become something like a living force, an atavistic energy, Would you be willing to comment on this force?

Vargas Llosa: My first inkling of this novel was in 1975, when I lived n Dominican Republic for almost eight months. During this time, I heard so many anecdotes about Trujillo, so many testimonies about what it was like during those years and, of course, I read many, many books about Trujillo and his thirty-one years of dictatorship. Probably the most impressive thing for me was the way in which Trujillo used sex as an instrument of power. This was done is a very distorted way. It is an agreed-upon fact that Trujillo went to bed with his collaborators’ wives. You have the impression that in many cases he did this not because he was in love, or attracted by these women, but because he wanted to make his collaborators pass a test of loyalty. In a machista country, you know, the supreme test was this one. Do you accept that I go to bed with your wife, to demonstrate your loyalty to the chief, the generalissimo? Because it was usually a fairly public thing, these acts of seduction. Trujillo wanted the affected husbands to know; he wanted to see their reaction. And what is very surprising is that in a machista country—as all Latin American countries were, and many still are—the ministers and close collaborators passed the test! They accepted Trujillo’s seductions out of fear, or ambition, because they wanted the power that Trujillo could confer. I was really impressed by the coldness, the very cynical way, that Trujillo used sex as an instrument of political power. It was a way to demonstrate to his collaborators that he was the master and they were the servants. But, I asked myself, what about the women? What about these women who were the objects in a power game where the only protagonists were men—the only protagonist was Trujillo, really. So, that gave me the idea o create the character of Urania, who is an invented character but embodies many of the experiences of the women in the Dominican Republic of that time.

Zamora: One of the terrible aspects of your portrayal of the Trujillo dictatorship is this complicity between the victims and the victimizer. Your novel doesn’t portray a simple dialectic between evil an innocence, where Trujillo is the villain and the rest are innocent victims; rather, you describe abuses far more systematic and integral to a generalized system of corruption.

Vargas Llosa: Probably one of the worst consequences of a dictatorship—of any authoritarian regime—is the corruption that spreads from the center of power to large segments of society. It is very difficult in a totalitarian dictatorship, where the dictator controls everything, not to become an accomplice. In a totalitarian state, there is the choice of being a hero or an accomplice, and of course, most people choose, very reasonably, to be an accomplice rather than a hero. That is what has always happened in dictatorships, especially in the case of an extreme dictatorship such as Trujillo’s, where a kind of abject loyalty is demanded of the common citizen.

Zamora: Clearly you are devoted to the specific historical settings of your novels. Would you comment on your use of historical facts and persons and events in your fiction?

Vargas Llosa: I have written at least three novels based on historical events. I think a writer can use history as raw material for writing, with the condition of not being paralyzed by the idea of truthfulness. I don’t think you write novels to tell the truth in historical terms. No. You write novel to invent a reality, to invent a world parallel to the real world, and if this fiction is alive, if the novelist is successful, it becomes the truth, but a truth passing through a kind of lie. I admire writers who use history in this sense: Tolstoy, for example. I think that War and Peace is one of the greatest novels ever written, and it is based, of course, on the historical facts of the Napoleonic wars in Russia. Tolstoy said that he wanted to be a military historian, but he was a writer, an extraordinary creator of characters. War and Peace seems to be reproducing the Napoleonic wars and the impact of the French invasion on Russian society but he is, of course, inventing all of this, using history as a raw material that he manipulates with total freedom, and without being paralyzed by the idea of fidelity to facts. All great historical novels take liberties with history. That is what I think I’ve done in The Feast of the Goat and in The War of the End of the World, which is based on a civil war that took place in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, and also in Conversation in the Cathedral, which is about the dictatorship of Odria in Peru. The historical characters in my novel are treated as if they were fictional characters, without reproducing anecdotally their historical lives. My impression is that writers who have used history as raw material have done more or less the same. Les miserables, for example: the Battle of Waterloo is so important in the novel, but it is literary fiction rather than a historical rendering of the Battle of Waterloo.

Zamora: I’d like to ask you about the nature of your language, and about writing in Spanish. Do you consider that Spanish has special expressive capacities—it grammar, vocabulary, inherent musicality—that enable certain kinds of fiction that might be less likely to happen if you were writing in, say, French or English> We speak a language, but we are also spoken by it, are we not?

Vargas Llosa: Yes, yes, I think so. Spanish is a newer language than English, and Spanish literature is a more recent phenomenon than English literature. In English, there is a long tradition of literary writing that is nourished by the language of the streets, and I think that this is one of the strengths of the English novel—and the American novel, of course. This embrace of the vernacular cam much later in Spanish literature; in fact, it probably occurred first in Latin America and then in Spain.

And then there is the fact that Spanish is much more impressionistic language than English, and certainly than French, which is very rationalistic. In French, ideas and logic are always there; the language imposes this propensity of the French for ideas, logic, rational thinking. In Spanish, it is just the opposite! (laughter) In Spanish, ideas are the less important aspect; much more important are passions, feelings, emotions. In general, good prose writers in Spanish us a lot of words, because they need to express ideas though emotions, feelings, intuitions.

Zamora: It’s well known that translations in English are always shorter than the Spanish originals, because of the structure of the two languages. Spanish requires more words than English o express the same thought . . .

Vargas Llosa: Of course, we need a lot of words to say the same thing!  If we are very sober, we have a feeling of poor-ness. We need abundance, and it is the language that pushes us toward this. Take Octavio Paz or Ortega y Gasset: great, great writers in Spanish who have in common their use of words o create an atmosphere, a sensuous surface upon which to float their ideas. Their style is intimately linked to the nature of language.

Zamora: It’s a baroque prose . . . .

Vargas Llosa: It was Alejo Carpentier’s theory that the baroque is the natural expression of Latin America. Perhaps so, but there also are important exceptions. Borges is a big, big exception; he is so unusual in our tradition because he has more ideas than words. This would not be unusual in French or German or English, but it is in Spanish. Borges subverted in a very strong literary tradition with his economy, his austerity of expression. The language in Borges is so strict, so disciplined—totally unusual in Spanish. This is what gives Borges his personality, his peculiarity in the Spanish-speaking world, because exuberance, not economy, characterizes the Spanish language and its literature.

Zamora: Let me ask you some of the questions from our audience. (The audience has been invited to write down their questions, from which several are selected for discussion.) There is a group of questions that asks about politics rather specifically, and since they’re relatively short, I’ll read you some of them:

“How do you see the future of Peru and the rest of Latin America?”
“What is your opinion of President Toledo’s plans to get the Peruvian economy out of chaos?”
“What about the past government of Fujimori? Was there anything positive in that?”
“Why do you think that President Toledo is so unpopular, and Alan Garcia, a thief, is so popular?”

Vargas Llosa: Well, thieves are quite popular in Latin America! (laughter)

Zamora: And one more question in this group: “Do you have any future political plans in Peru?”

Vargas Llosa: No, I don’t have any political plans. My political adventure was very short, and unrepeatable. I learned lot from my 1990 presidential campaign in Peru, and one of the things I learned is that I’m not a politician.

More generally, I would say that there is currently great pessimism about Latin America, when only two or three years ago there was great optimism. The sensible thing to say at the moment about Latin American politics is that although we are having a very bad crisis, particularly in economic terms, we have improved a lot since those years in which, from Mexico to Argentina, we had dictators and military regimes. I think it’s a great improvement that now, with the exception of Cuba and Venezuela, we have civilian regimes born out of elections—more or less free elections. It is true that our democracies are imperfect. How could it be otherwise? We don’t have democratic tradition but rather a tradition of authoritarianism. Dictatorships leave a terrible sequel that undermines the functioning of the new democracies. What is interesting, and I think positive, is that in spite of the current economic crisis and the legacy of the dictators, our democracies are holding up. And I don’t think that there is a mood in Latin America to return to the caudillo era that was so destructive in our countries. The exception, of course, is Venezuela. In Venezuela, you have an apprentice dictator, who is Chaves. Unfortunately, Chavez was very popular at the beginning; I don’t think that he is anymore, but he is destroying Venezuela’s democratic system little by little. What will happen I don’t know, but I hope that the civilian movement wills top this destruction, and I certainly hope that this pattern won’t be imitated elsewhere.

It is a very difficult period. I think that the major cause of our current economic crisis is corruption. Corruption has been the most damaging factor, and a good example of that is my own country. Someone in our audience asked a question about Fujimori. Fujimori was one of the most corrupt dictatorships we have had in our history. He destroyed practically all the productive machinery of Peru with a systematic corruption that infected all of our institutions, and in a very poor country like Peru, hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen by Fujimori and Montesinos and the generals who were their accomplices. That’s a fantastic economic achievement! (laughter) Really extraordinary! But how can a country that has been robbed in this way recover and become a modern, functioning economy in a few months, or a year? It is impossible, and this is the major challenge to our democracies. It is important not to become pessimistic, and most of all to remember that in spite of the failures, we are much better off than we have been in the past; as long as democracy exists, the is always hope, because democracy is completely different from dictatorship. Democracy can be reformed and improved from inside, but not a dictatorship. Even if we sill have imperfect democracies in Latin America, I think there is hope.

Zamora: Here is another question from one of the members of our audience: “What are your thoughts on global markets, particularly for uneducated people in developing countries?”

Vargas Llosa: I am in favor of globalization. I think that it is the best thin that has happened to mankind, and I think that it is a big mistake. Globalization is also a political matter, and we need to globalize democracy. What is important is to replace all the authoritarian regimes in the world with democratic regimes, and if we achieve this, economic globalization will follow. Internationalization of markets in many cases does not work because there is no legal system that defends people against corruption and abuses and exploitation, and the only way you can have a legal system that will guarantee the correct functioning of markets is with democratic regimes.

I think that it would be a mistake to consider that globalization is bad, and that we must return to nationalism. Nationalism had been the worst plague civilization has suffered, and we know this very well in Latin America, where during our whole history we have spent absurd amounts of money buying arms and tanks and guns and weapons in order to kill each other, This has been the big pretext of the military to take power so many times: the enemies are at our gates . . . . I think that globalization will moderate the nationalistic drives that are used to undermine civilian society and democratic institutions, and that have always been the alibi of dictatorship in Latin America.

Zamora: And what about the cultural homogenization that is often assumed to accompany globalization—let’ call it the Americanization of the world? Is that a concern of yours?

Vargas Llosa: It is a concern of the French! (laughter) The French are terrified by the idea that the American culture may be destroying their rich, civilized tradition. They are very worried about this, the French! I think this is totally—maybe this is a bad word—totally stupid. Totally stupid. Nationalism and culture are incompatible. I’m a Francophile. I’ve been a Francophile all my life, and what I admire in French literature, in French thinking, is the universal projection that heir great thinker and writers have always had. They were never afraid the open the borders of French culture and absorb everything that was interesting and creative abroad; that is the great richness of French literature and French culture. They are now afraid because they feel that this extraordinary richness is not there any more; in fact, they are producing a very mediocre kind of literature and thinking, which is sad but momentary. This happens in all cultures.

The idea that the American culture is going to overcome and destroy the rest of the cultures of the world is a fetish, an imaginary terror without real foundation. Because what is this American culture that is going to destroy the world? For me, the American culture is an extraordinary mixture of people and things, and I am sure that in this university and in many American universities, French thinkers that no longer have an important influence in France are still extremely important here: Foucault, Alcan, Derrida. In American universities, there is an imaginary kind of terror, based on a political, critical attitude toward the U.S., that is behind the idea that McDonald’s is going to occupy the world. This is already an act! But, why are the Europeans so worried about McDonald’s, and not about pizza? Because if there is an imperialist object that has been taking over the world, it is the pizza. The Italian pizza! And nobody pays any attention to this danger!

Seriously, I think that what is happening now is exactly the opposite of all that terrifies the nationalists about globalization. Globalization is creating an atmosphere in which regional and local cultures that were destroyed, sometimes brutally, in order to create a fiction of homogenous national culture, are now reappearing, and often with great force because globalization has weakened the national culture. I am very happy with this development. I think that it is an act of justice. In Spain, for example, the Catalans, Galicians, Basques have their own language, their own traditions, which can coexist perfectly well with Spanish. This is also happening in France—in Brittany, for example. T.S. Eliot predicted this in his essay “Notes toward the definition of a Culture,” which he wrote more than fifty years ago and which seemed completely crazy. He said that in the near future, what would happen in cultural terms all over the world would be a renaissance of regional and local cultures. It is happening now! We’ll have a worldwide culture in which we can communicate with each other and, at the same time, as people need to be protected and feel that they are among themselves, they will develop regional and local cultures. I imagine a very rich competition between the local and the universal that will be much more authentic than the artificial national cultures that have been our principal paradigm since the nineteenth century.

Zamora: You dramatize these ideas very effectively in The Storyteller.

Vargas Llosa: Yes, that novel dramatizes the oppression of a very old and admirable local culture by the national culture, but the indigenous culture nonetheless possesses a cultural mechanism—its storytellers—by which it survives. In fact, Latin American literature has produced very creative works in this area because we have always been very open to other traditions and cultures. I can give you my own example. When I was young in Peru, in Lima, what I read mostly, and probably this was the case of most Latin Americans of my generation, were foreign authors; we read American novelists: Hemingway, Doss Passos, Faulkner; we read French authors: Flaubert, Sartre, Camus; Italian authors: Moravia; English authors; German authors. I think that this has given Latin American literature a kind of perspective that is not all provincial; writers like Jorge Luis Borges or Octavio Paz or Alejo Carpentier wouldn’t have been possible without this openness to other cultures and other literatures. These writers were real citizens of the world. It is very important not to be secluded in your own tradition if you want to write works that are universal, that is, works in which people from other traditions can recognize their own worlds.

Zamora: Moving to a question about your craft, in your book entitles Letters to a Young Novelist, you state: “Writing novels is the equivalent of what professional stripper do when they take off their clothes and exhibit their naked bodies on stage. The novelist performs the same acts in reverse.” Can you say more about this?

Vargas Llosa: Well, I use the striptease as an image, a metaphor . . . not in literal terms! (laughter!) I think that pure invention does not exist, or is very rare. Invention develops out of memory—at least, this is my case, and I think that it is also the case of many other writers. The point of departure for inventing, or creating a fiction is deeply rooted in memory. At the same you are inventing, you are also clothing the personal experience that has marked you memory for reasons that are usually mysterious to the writer. You build around this experience, and this building up of the fiction is sometimes so effective that you are unable, when you have finished the fiction, to recognize the memory that was the reason for writing the friction in the first place. This has been my experience in all of the novels I have written; I have written my novels because certain things happened to me—people whom I met or events in which I participated or was aware of—things that impressed me so much on a very personal, very intimate level that I began to develop an invented story. When you read a great novel, you can always find at the beginning something—some occurrence or love affair or tragedy—that deeply marked the author and that was so encouraging to fantasize about, and then write about, that the novel came into being. This is the sense in which I use this metaphor. Yes, as you write, little by little you are clothing that was a naked memory.

At this point, Mr. Vargas Llosa was liberated from the stage in order to sign several handout copies of his books. We continued our conversation the following morning in a less formal way.

Zamora: What about the translation for your novels? Are you generally pleased with the quality of the translations in English?

Vargas Llosa: That depends very much on the translator, of course. There are translators who are able to reproduce in their own linguistic terms, a literary work. I think that this is a great achievement: to reconstruct a world in another language; you have to capture the ways in which words produce associations and relate to myths or stereotypes or images, and this is very difficult. I have very good experiences with the translation of my books, but sometimes . . . incredible! My first novel, for example, La cuidad y los perros, which was translated, unfortunately, into English as Time of the Hero, which is an awful title, but my publisher didn’t want to use The City and the Dogs. Well, one day a friend of mine who is Spanish and was teaching in Upsala, Sweden, asked me if I knew that the translation of La cuidad y los perros is a completely different book from the one I had written. This novel is set in a military school: the students are young—thirteen or fourteen year olds. My friend told me that in the Swedish translation, each time that the cadet smokes, he doesn’t smoke tobacco but marijuana! What?!!! The translator had decided that it was not enough for these students to smoke tobacco, and so in the translation, they smoke marijuana! Swedish readers got quite another version from other readers!

Zamora: Let’s speak of another sort of translation: I’m wondering which of your novels have been made into movies, and whether you have participated in this process?

Vargas Llosa: I’ve been involved in the adaptation of only one of my novels to the cinema; it was Pantaleon y las visitadoras (translated as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service) in the 70s. I wrote the script and I also participated in the shooting of the film. The result was such a catastrophe that I won’t repeat it! I like cinema very much bit it is another language, and you cannot translate a story that you have conceived with words into images. It needs to be completely recreated in another language; I’d rather rite directly on original script than an adaptation. Since then, when there have been projects based on my novels, I give permission and I go to see the film!

Zamora: Have you like he films that have been made without your permission?

Vargas Llosa: Well, there was the adaptation by John Amiel of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriters, which I didn’t like very much. The movie was given the title Tune in Tomorrow. It was set in New Orleans, and I think it was very schematic; a lot of irony and important ideas had completely disappeared in the film. I think that the acting was quite good, but I didn’t really recognize my novel in the film. There was an adaptation of my first novel, La cuidad y los perros, translated as The Time of the Hero by the Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi; it was a modest budget film and it was well done, well acted; and there had been a new version of Pantaleon y las visitadores (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service) by Lombardi, a very interesting reading of the novel because it’s a serious version. The comic element had been reduced drastically, and it is much more the dramatic story of a poor officer in charge of an idiosyncratic mission. And now there is a project in the works about The Feast of the Goat. We’ll see . . . .

Zamora: The novel seems very cinematic.

Vargas Llosa: It could be a good film. Character and action are so important.
Zamora: Francisco Lombardi had made a film called Tinta roja (Red Ink), which is about popular journalism, and it seems to resemble some of your fiction.

Vargas Llosa: Well, it’s a story that I tell in Historia de Mayta (translated as The Real History of Alejandro Mayta)—no! It is in Litumen en los Andes, which is translated as Death in the Andes. It’s based on the terrorism of the Shining Path during the 80s—a very difficult, hard, brutal film, a very interesting film . . . .

Zamora: I’d like to ask you a question about the intertextuality of your fiction you often embed a particular work of literature in a prominent position in your novels as a kind of touchstone or landmark that seems to signal to the reader the direction in which you want him or her to go. I’m thinking of Conversation in the Cathedral, where on the first page you have your protagonist reading Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point; or The Way of the End of the World, where your character is the Brazilian writer Euclides de Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands. Then there is the less prominent embedding of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in The Storyteller, and the different sort of intertextuality of the paintings that are included in In Praise of the Stepmother. Would you be willing to comment about this “intertextual urge” in your writing?

Vargas Llosa: I have a project at the moment, a long, ambitious, difficult project, about Don Rigoberto and Dona Lucrecia, the characters from In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, in which I want to use the ideas of three important thinkers: Adam Smith, Charles Fourier, the utopian thinker of the 19th century, a very interesting mind, a bit crazy, but very, very original, and Victor Hugo. I want a kind of plot structure in which Don Rigoberto, who is always looking for the perfect way of life, traces a certain tradition of libertarianism that begins in the 18th century and collapses by the end of the 10th. My idea is that Don Rigoberto will move inside these texts as a physical environment; I am still working on this, and I’m very excited about the project.

Zamora: So, your character will live within the literary texts?

Vargas Llosa: Yes, but it will be very difficult to materialize; I’ll have to find the narrative techniques.

Zamora: It sounds like a very challenging project. To change our focus somewhat, let me ask you if you have read Stephen King’s book on writing . . .

Vargas Llosa: Stephen King has a book on writing? I don’t read horror fiction—only Poe or Stephenson—only great writers; I don’t like genre.

Zamora: Well, King’s book on writing is rather interesting, and he refers to an interview with Amy Tan in which an interview asks her whether there are questions that she wishes interview would ask her, but never do. She replies, yes, they don’t ask me about the words. So, let me ask you about “the words.” Can you speak of your work on this level? What would you say about the words?

Vargas Llosa: I cannot separate words, language, from the story that I wan to tell. You cannot use words indifferently from the matter they express; so, for me, thin linguistic aspect of creation is entirely subordinated to the story, the characters. There is only one exception among all m books, where I had a formal idea that was, in a way, separate from the content. This was my long short story, or short novel, called Los cachorros (The Cubs) In that case, I did have an idea that this story should be told by a voice in which a collective narrator would alternate with individual narrators, and it would be a constant shifting from a collective voice to individual voices, and the whole story would be more musical that words usually are. Music would be important: the creation of a rhythm, of a melody in which the reader would be distracted critical initiative. But that was the only case in which I had this formal idea in an abstract way. For the rest, no! With each novel, I look for the appropriate language and expression to materialize a story. The story is never very clear in my mind until it is materialized in words, but I have a general idea, and I know by intuition to instinct rather than reasoning the kinds of words that I need to tell a particular kind of story.

Zamora: Part of the reason I ask you about words is because of your wonderful book on Flaubert, The Perpetual Orgy.

Vargas Llosa: Yes, Flaubert was obsessed with words. Le mot just! He had the idea that the only way in which you knew that you had found the right word was through the ear. His language had to have the perfect musical sound—the rhythm, the pauses, the balance of vowels and consonants—so he would shout his sentences and paragraphs: the test of le gueuloit, as he called it—so he could hear what he had written.

Zamora: I also thought to ask you about words because of the very different styles of your novels. How different the style of The Feast of Goats from, say, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Or Captain Pantoja and the Special Service from The War of the End of the World.

Vargas Llosa: That’s exactly it! You cannot tell the story of Captain Pantoja and the story of the Counselor with the same words. Completely different moods, styles, social levels. So, I would say that unlike other writers, who usually have a characteristic style, my case is quite different: my style depends upon the subject, the theme, the content of the story. Sometimes my language is very visual, in The Green House for example, or in In Praise of the Stepmother: the language is so visual because the novels are about sensual pleasure, about painting, so the words must have certain sensuality; very different from telling the story of Trujillo, where words should . . . disappear into the content of the novel.

Zamora: One last question: what contemporary writers do you read?

Vargas Llosa: My last big, bug discovery was W.E. Sebald, the German writer who died last year in a car crash in England. The Rings of Saturn, The Immigrants, Austerlitz: he published only four novels, and in the process created a literary genre: travelogue, fiction, essay, poetry. A very good writer. He lived most of his life in England, but wrote in German. His books have photographs that he took himself. Austerlitz is his masterpiece. A fascinating book about an architect, but he himself is always present. All of his books are about Jewish persecution but so subtle. So subtle.

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