Mario Vargas Llosa – författare

I Lockrop berättar Mario Vargas Llosa sin intellektuella historia. Boken är en bildningsresa där författaren återvänder till böckerna som format honom. Han finner en livslång strid mellan lockropet från den egna stammen och västs universella ideal. I en tid då identitet och kultur hetsar fram lokala och globala spänningar ger 83-åringen ett djupt personligt perspektiv på en konflikt som aldrig varit mera aktuell eller förts med högre insatser.

Mario Vargas Llosa föddes i Peru 1936 och tilldelades Nobelpriset i litteratur 2010.

"Berättar lättsamt elegant och medryckande och lyckas göra sol-och-vårkvinnan till en människa av kött och blod … Mer än en mansdröm framstår stygga flickan som en bild av äventyret och spänningen … ja varför inte som en bild av själva fiktionens lockelse." Helsingborgs Dagblad De är femton när de träffas första gången i Limas burgna villastad Miraflores i början av femtiotalet. Lily, "den lilla chilenskan", är fräck och framfusig och bäst på att dansa mambo. Ricardo, medelklassynglingen, blir handlöst och hjälplöst förälskad, men avvisas av den flyktiga Lily. Ödet vill att deras vägar korsas många gånger under de kommande decennierna, på platser runtom i världen: Paris, Tokyo, London, Madrid och Havanna. Varje gång blir Ricardo lika förälskad i Lily igen, men själv älskar Lily sin frihet och den trygghet som bara pengar och makt kan ge.

In his final novel, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa returns to his native Peru. Tono Azpilcueta, proletarian intellectual, writer of sundry articles, aspirant to the now-defunct professorship of Peruvian studies, is an expert in the vals, a genre of music descended from the European waltz but rooted in New World creole culture. When he hears a performance by the elusive guitarist Lalo Molfino, Tono is convinced not only that he is in the presence of the country's finest musician, but also that his own love for Peruvian music, as he has long suspected, has a profound, provable social function. If he could just write the biography of the man before him and tell the story of both the vals and its attendant inspiring ethos, huachaferia (Peru's great contribution to world culture, as per Tono), he might capture his country's soul and inspire his fellow citizens to remember the ties that bind them. Through music, the populace might come together, lay down their arms, and embrace a harmonious and unified Peruvian culture.Both a send-up of parochial idealism and a love song to the culture of his homeland, Mario Vargas Llosa's I Give You My Silence is the moving final novel of the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner, whose enduring works captured a changing Latin America. The tragic hero Tono and his belief in a democratic, proletarian music at odds with the culture and politics of a modern Peru scarred by violence is the writer's last statement on the revelatory, maddening, foolhardy, yet irrepressible conviction that art has profound transformative power.

Liberties, a Journal of Culture and Politics, is essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues of our time.

In this issue of Liberties: Katherine C. Epstein — Scholarship and the Future of Society; Mario Vargas Llosa — A Forgotten Giant; Cass R. Sunstein — A Constitutional Manifesto; Mark Edmundson — The Trouble with Good People; James Wolcott — Billionaires on Parada; Elliot Ackerman — The American Strategic Imagination; Moshe Halbertal — Two Concepts of God in Judaism and Beyond; Noga Arikha — Why Brain Science does not Have the Last Word; Carlos Fraenkel — Astronomy and Magic; Daphne Merkin — What You Never Knew About Sigmund Freud’s Wife; James R. Russell — The Poet Misak Medzarents, and Two Poems; Robert Alter — What Flaubert Taught Agnon; Rachel Connolly — The Unfunny Fate of Humor in Our Time; Helen Vendler — The Excitement of Discovering a New Poet; Celeste Marcus — Israel and The Struggle for Liberal Nationalism; Leon Wieseltier — How To Think Unhysterically About Change; and, poetry by Leslie Williams and Misak Medzarents.

Liberties features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and introduces the next generation of writers and poets to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today’s culture and politics. Nobel Prize winners, leading op-ed writers, well-known non-fiction writers, rising talents, and poets from around the world. A new issue is published every quarter.

There’s a reason why engaged citizens, cultural warriors, political leaders, opinion makers, and activists from across the cultural and political spectrum read and cherish Liberties.