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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010

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RICARDO SOMOCURCIO is in love with a bad girl.
He loves her as a coy teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas L10sa has created a beguiling epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.

Gái hư làm nát tan trái tim của bạn, nhưng The Bad Girl, không phải chỉ là về gái hư, về ‘viết lại’ Madame Bovary, mà còn là về 1 thời, thập niên 1950, 1960 của tác giả và của nhân vật của mình:
VL viết ‘tửng tửng’ [wry humour],‘nhân hậu và cảm động' [affection], về cả hai, những nhân vật, và hai thập niên đã biến mất của ông 1950, và 60. Câu chuyện, the story, về nhựa đời và kẻ đào vàng, sau cùng biến thành một câu chuyện cổ tích, a tale, về tình yêu không đòi hỏi, vô điều kiện, unconditional love.
The Christian Science Monitor. 

Day of the fox [Ngày của con chồn]
Mario Vargas Llosa: an unclassifiable Nobel winner

Novelist William Boyd pays tribute to 'a great chroncicler of the highs and lows of our carnal and passionate adventures as human beings'.

Vargas Llosa is very hard to classify and pin down as a writer: he has written short novels and very long novels, comic novels and deeply serious novels, straightforward realistic novels and recognisably South American "magic-realist" novels. Perhaps this unclassifiability has been seen as a disadvantage. Indeed, when one compares Vargas Llosa to his great South American literary rival Gabriel García Márquez one is reminded of Archilochus's old fox and hedgehog adage: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." Márquez, a hedgehog novelist if there ever was one, received his Nobel in 1982 at the age of 55. Vargas Llosa received his at the age of 74. Almost 30 years later the day of the fox has arrived – it inevitably comes around, even if it takes a little longer.

Bài viết trên đây, về Vargas Llosa, cũng thật tuyệt. Nó làm Mít chúng ta nhớ tới Kim Dung, và nhân vật chưởng môn nhân phái Tiêu Dao, sư phụ của Tô Tinh Hà của ông, ngoài võ công ra, cầm kỳ thi họa, chi cũng rành, sau bị học trò Đinh Xuân Thu, chuyên học chỉ một môn võ công, hất ngôi.

Con chồn biết nhiều thứ, con nhím chỉ biết 1 thứ.
Nếu chỉ nói văn chương, VL 'thua' GM, nhưng GM làm sao so được với một VL, ‘nhà tạp ghi’?

GNV về già tìm lại được cái thú đọc tiểu thuyết, sau khi mất bao nhiêu ngày tháng, "quên cả thù riêng", không làm sao có thì giờ để mà trả lời câu hỏi ‘có mấy NQT,’ cho Thầy Cuốc, và cho chính GNV, chỉ một lòng một dạ truy tìm và tận diệt, search and destroy, (1) Cái Ác Bắc Kít.

Biết đâu, nhờ vậy, mà viết được cuốn tiểu thuyết về đời mình, thời của mình, [cũng thập niên 1950, và 60], và Gấu Cái, của mình!

(1) 'search and destroy': thuật ngữ của giới nhà binh, đúng hơn, của tướng Westmoreland, khi điều trần trước quốc hội Mẽo, để xin thêm Yankee mũi lõ cho chiến trường Việt Nam.
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Re: VL & Casement & Sebald.
Before becoming fatally entangled in the Irish nationalist movement, Casement was best known for his service as a British diplomat in Africa. His Congo Report (1904) exposed Belgian atrocities and was probably influenced by Joseph Conrad’s great 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. When Dean read the pages in which Sebald describes Casement’s trial for treason, she realized that the presiding judge who had condemned Casement to death was her great, great uncle.
Source
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"The story's message, though, is as profound as it was when Flaubert set the template in Madame Bovary. Since desire defines us, the author is telling us, isn't 'the bad girl' our perfect hero?" -The Week magazine

Phải chăng Gấu Cái mới đích thực là nhân vật hoàn hảo của... chúng ta?

Tại sao trong truyện ngắn của GNV, truyện nào cũng thấp thoáng một em, trừ… Gấu Cái?
Ui dào, toàn bản nháp không hà? Thứ bóng hồng tuyệt hảo, của ông ta, là tui, nhưng ông ta đâu có đủ tài năng, để mà ‘dziết da’ [viết ra]!
[Gấu Cái trả lời phỏng vấn báo Sóng Văn, ở Mẽo] (1)
Tại sao mi không chọn 1 trong những thánh nữ của mi, mà lại chọn nỗi đau khổ của mi, là… ta?

(1)
Đọc loáng thoáng cuốn Vera, của tay Stacy Schiff, Gấu mua ‘xôn’, từ đời nào, viết về bà xã của Nabokov, vớ được một ‘giai thoại’ thật thần sầu.
Vera, một lần, khi một nhà xb xin chân dung ông chồng, đã gửi đi một tấm, khi Nabokov còn là một đứa con nít, kèm ghi chú: "Bạn cứ nhìn vào mắt thằng bé con này, là thấy ra tất cả những tác phẩm của ông chồng tôi".
[If U look carefully into the baby’s eyes, U can see all of my husband’s books].
Kể cho Gấu Cái nghe, bả bĩu môi, sao hay bằng câu của ta. Mà mi đâu có nhớ?

Gấu, nhớ.
Lần đó, tờ Sóng Văn của tay Sao Mai, Gấu cộng tác, qua sự giới thiệu của nhà thơ LH, có làm một cuộc phỏng vấn, không phải nhà văn, mà vợ nhà văn. Gấu Cái trả lời, có hai câu thật bảnh.

Kỷ niệm nhớ đời, trong cuộc đời làm vợ nhà văn nhớn, Gấu Nhà Văn.

Đó là lần rước dâu, từ Cai Lậy về Sài Gòn. Năm đó, lụt lớn [1966, hay 67, Gấu không nhớ rõ]. (2) Có những đoạn đường phải dùng đò. Trên đò, có đủ khổ đau, đủ dùng, không chỉ đời này, mà còn cho đời sau, không chỉ cho “hai”, mà “ba” người ngồi trên đò.

Gấu nhà văn chỉ có vài truyện ngắn, vậy mà có đến vài hình bóng đàn bà…?

Ôi dào, toàn là bản nháp không à. Bản thực sự, viết về tui, ông ta không đủ tài viết ra.
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Câu của Gấu Cái quả là bảnh hơn nhiều, nếu phải so với câu của Vera.
Bạn có nhớ con thuyền Noé?
Và cuộc di tản ra biển sau 1975?
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Câu của Vera, còn thua cả câu của Sáu Dân, ngay sau khi giải phóng Sài Gòn.
Ông VC Trùm cả nước phán:
Nhìn vào vầng trán cháu ngoan Bác Hồ thành phố, thấy cả tương lai Mít.

(2) Gấu Cái đọc, đoạn trên, bực quá, chửi, lấy nhau năm nào, mà mi cũng quên ư?
NKTV

Mario Vargas Llosa
A Latin American liberal
A great writer who has become his region’s conscience
The Economist


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010

Trong bài viết Xứ sở với ngàn bộ mặt, VL nhắc tới tuổi thơ, những năm đầu đời, mê Faulkner, ‘y chang’ GNV, thời gian mới ra trường, đi làm Bưu Điện, gặp lại BHD, ở nơi con đường băng ngang vườn Tao Đàn khi em trên đường đi tới trường Gia Long, sau bao năm năm tháng, nghĩa là sau cái lần bị ông bố tống cổ ra khỏi nhà, thời gian gia đình BHD dời con phố Phan Đình Phùng lên khu Ngã Sáu Gia Long. 

And in a way I was, because I was reading voraciously, and with growing admiration, a number of writers considered by Marxists at the time to be 'gravediggers of Western culture': Henry Miller, Joyce, Hemingway, Proust, Malraux, Celine, Borges. But, above all, Faulkner. Perhaps the most enduring part of my university years was not what I learned in lecture halls, but what I discovered in the novels and stories that recounted the saga of Yoknapatawpha County. I remember how dazzling it was to read - pencil and paper in hand - Light in August, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and the like, and to discover in those pages the infinite complexity of shade and allusion and the textual and conceptual richness that a novel could provide. Also to learn that to tell a story well required a conjuror's technique. The literary models of my youth have palled, like Sartre, whom I can no longer read. But Faulkner is still a major writer for me and every time that I read him, I am convinced that his work is a novelistic summa, comparable to the great classics. In the 1950S in Latin America, we read mainly European and North American writers and hardly looked at our own writers. This has now changed: readers in Latin America discovered their novelists at the same time as the rest of the world did so.
THE COUNTRY OF A THOUSAND FACES   
Bởi vì tôi ngốn sách như điên, và, cùng với sự ngưỡng mộ tăng dần là con số những tác giả, được đám Mác Xít thời đó coi là "những kẻ đào mồ chôn văn hóa Tây Phương": Henry Miller, Joyce, Hemingway, Proust, Malraux, Celine, Borges. Nhưng, trên tất cả là Faulkner. Có thể nói, những năm học đại học, cái phần dai dẳng còn đọng lại ở trong tôi thì không phải là từ những bài học tại giảng đường mà là những gì tôi khám phá ra trong những tiểu thuyết, truyện ngắn kể về một miền đất giả tưởng Yoknapatawpha County.

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Khi dịch Phu Nhân ở Somerset, Gấu sống thời gian mỗi cuối tuần lên gặp em BHD đi nghỉ hè ở Đà Lạt, và nhớ luôn, cuốn tiểu thuyết Faulkner thủ trong túi, đọc lai rai suốt quãng đường mấy trăm cây số Sài Gòn – Đà Lạt, 'vô tình' để lọt cái cảnh ngồi bên BHD trên chiếc tắc xi già leo không nổi con dốc, cứ lên tới đỉnh là lại tụt xuống, và, nhân đó, nhớ... Camus: ‘Phải tưởng tượng Sisyphus hạnh phúc’. 

Miss Trask đâu có thì giờ để làm công tác xã hội với những người lối xóm. Hay để ngồi lê đôi mách về giá cả cuộc sống thường nhật, bữa này thịt cá hơi bị mắc, hay không làm sao kiếm được một bó rau muống, hay ca cẩm về đám trẻ bây giờ mất dậy quá, "anh anh tôi tôi" với cả bậc tiên chỉ! Bởi vì mỗi phút của cuộc đời của cô thì đều được tập trung cao độ về những đam mê bất khả: búng tay một cái là dúm tro than kia biến mất, và Bông Hồng Đen lại xuất hiện, trước cặp mắt mừng rỡ đến phát khùng phát điên lên được của anh cu Gấu!
Làm sao đám người “mưa đêm tỉnh lẻ” lại có thể đem đến cho Miss Trask, những ngôi nhà đỉnh gió hú, những cánh rừng ma, những rừng thông Đà Lạt, và chiếc tắc xi già, nặng nhọc leo lên đến đầu con dốc, là hết hơi , bèn từ từ lùi xuống: Phải tưởng tượng Cu Gấu hạnh phúc [Tưởng tượng gì nữa, khi có BHD ngồi kế bên!]
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Sinh tại Arequipa, miền nam Peru, 1936, những tác phẩm đầu tay của VL đậm đà hương vị, và những bất công của quê nhà của ông. “La Ciudad y los Perros”, cái tít tiếng Anh “The Time of the Hero”, thực không đúng với nó, là một giả tưởng dựa trên quãng đời chẳng sung sướng gì của tác giả, khi còn là thanh niên, theo học tại một trường quân sự ở Lima. Thường xuyên hiện diện trong tác phẩm của ông, là những tình cảm rắm rối, nhiều khi trái ngược nhau, về quê hương Peru của ông, nhưng đề tài và nhân vật của ông ngày càng trở thành phổ cập. Còn một đề tài trở đi trở lại hoài trong tác phẩm của ông, là sự truy tìm [điều, chủ nghĩa] không tưởng, và những hậu quả thường xuyên là tai hại của nó, về chính trị, cho đời sống riêng tư của từng cá nhân, và được ông khai triển bằng những đường hướng khác nhau, ở trong những cuốn như “The War of the End of the World”, “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” và “The Way to Paradise”, một nghiên cứu, nhìn từ đối điểm, những cuộc sống của họa sĩ Paul Gauguin, và người bà mang hai dòng máu Pháp-Peru của ông, Flora Tristán, một nhà nữ quyền thời kỳ đầu của phong trào này.
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Wellsprings, Suối Nguồn, tập tiểu luận mới nhất, 2008 của VL,  gồm đa số những bài đã từng in ấn, về một số tác giả, tác phẩm ảnh hưởng nhiều tới ông, hoặc những đề tài mà ông thực sự quan tâm: 1. Bốn thế kỷ Don Quixote. 2. Những giả tưởng của Borges. 3. Ortega y Gassett và Sự Sống Lại của một người Tự do. 4. Sự thách đố của chủ nghĩa quốc gia. 5. Giả tưởng và Thực tại tại Mỹ La Tinh. 6. Isaiah Berlin, người hùng của thời của chúng ta. 7. Cập nhật Karl Popper.

TV sẽ giới thiệu bài “Sự thách đố của chủ nghĩa quốc gia”, vì cái chủ nghĩa quốc gia này, quả đúng là của mấy anh VC như Thái Dúi!
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Gấu đọc VL, lần đầu tiên, là qua bài viết Sự thực của những lời dối trá, đăng trên tờ Partisan Review, và sau đó, tóm tắt, đăng trên Văn, của NXH.
Biết tới Amos Oz, và nhiều tác giả khác nữa, như Czeslaw Milosz, Norman Manea..., qua tờ báo khuynh tả này!
Coetzee, là qua tờ NYRB. Từ Coetzee, ra cả một lô những tác giả khác, đa số, Mít chưa từng đọc!
Ngay cả Borges, cũng do GNV này lôi ra ánh sáng!
Linda Lê, cũng GNV giới thiệu, nhân đọc TLS điểm cuốn Vu Khống của bà.
Chê!

Trong Những Sắc Màu Khác, tập tiểu luận, của Orhan Pamuk, có bài: Mario Vargas Llosa và Văn học của Thế Giới Thứ Ba.
TV sẽ dịch, trong những kỳ tới.

Liệu có thứ kêu là văn chương Thế Giới Thứ Ba? Liệu có thể sắp xếp cho ra, establish – mà không sợ biến thành trò tầm phào, hay nâng bi miệt vườn, đặc sản, parochialism - những đức tính, đạo hạnh cơ bản của những xứ sở mà chúng ta gọi là Thế Giới Thứ Ba?


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010

Mario Vargas Llosa và Văn học của Thế Giới Thứ Ba.
Orhan Pamuk

Liệu có thứ kêu là văn chương Thế Giới Thứ Ba? Liệu có thể sắp xếp cho ra, establish – mà không sợ biến thành trò tầm phào, hay nâng bi miệt vườn, đặc sản, parochialism - những đức tính, đạo hạnh cơ bản của những xứ sở mà chúng ta gọi là Thế Giới Thứ Ba?


Landscape of violence
From the TLS of June 21, 1996
Orhan Pamuk

Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible, without being parochial and vulgar, to distinguish the essential features of the literatures of Third World countries? At best, as employed in the writings of Edward Said, the concept has helped to illuminate the multiplicity and diversity of the off-centre literatures, their non-Westernness, the idea of nationalism. At worst, elaborations on the concept of Third World literature, such as national allegories, are ways of politely evading the complexity and richness of whole continents of literatures. Borges began writing his short stories and essays in the Argentina of the 1930s, a Third World country by any standards, but his central place in world literature today is indisputable.
Yet there is a peculiar way of writing fiction in such countries, which is marked less by the writer's off-centre location than by his awareness of it, and Mario Vargas Llosa's work is a good example. What characterizes this kind of fiction is not the presence of off-centre problems - say, the social location of a "peripheral" country (although the social problems of Peru are everywhere in abundance in Vargas Llosa's fiction) - but the writer's way of relating himself to a real or imaginary centre of creativity where the main problems of his art are posed. What is crucial here is the writer's acceptance of his exile from where the history of his art is made. This is not necessarily a geographical exile (as in the case of Vargas Llosa, who spent most of his creative life not in his Peru but in Europe, at the centre of Western civilization), may sometimes be self-imposed and often relieves the author from the "anxiety of influence".
In this kind of fiction, the problems of originality do not engage the author in an obsessive dialogue with a father-figure or a precursor, because he realizes that the freshness of his subject-matter, the novelty of his geographical location, and even the new readership that he is addressing, will grant him an authenticity.
In one of the early pieces in Making Waves, Vargas Llosa reviews Simone de Beauvoir's novel Les Belles Images. He congratulates her for writing an excellent novel and for not being overshadowed by the authors of the "nouveau roman" who were fashionable at the time, whom he finds increasingly weak. The greatest merit of Simone de Beauvoir's novel, according to the young Vargas Llosa, is "to have made use of" the forms and expressive modes of Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Butor and Beckett for her own purposes, which were quite different from theirs.
This notion of "using" other authors' philo-sophies and techniques surfaces in an essay on Sartre. Vargas Llosa in his later years found Sartre's fiction to be humourless and lacking in mystery, his essays clear but politically confusing, and his art dated and unoriginal. He regrets having been so much influenced and even confused by him in his Marxist youth. His dis-illusionment, Vargas Llosa tells us, occurred in the summer of 1964, when in a notorious interview in Le Monde, Sartre, comparing literature to a child dying of hunger in a Third World country, implied that writing fiction is a luxury that can only be permitted with good conscience in prosperous and just societies. Yet Sartre's rational reasoning and his conviction that literature could never be a game, Vargas Llosa admits, were "useful", for they helped him to organize his life; they were a valuable guide to the labyrinth of culture and politics. This seemingly rational approach to inspiration, to the usefulness of other authors' inventions, and the constant awareness of being off-centre mark a certain naivety (a quality Vargas Llosa says Sartre lacks) and vitality which are felt not only in his early essays and book reviews, but other auto-biographical pieces in Making Waves as well.
Making Waves is a collection of essays and reviews, chronicling Vargas Llosa's heartfelt involvement in the literary and political events of the past thirty years. The book is extremely readable and Vargas Llosa is always engaging, whether the subject is his son's involvement with Rastafarians, the political profile of Nicaragua at the hands of the Marxist Sandinistas in 1985, or the World Cup in Spain in 1982. His literary heroes include Camus, whom he confesses he read dispassionately in his youth because of Sartre's strong influence; only years later, after a terrorist attack in Lima, did he read Camus's essay on violence in history, The Rebel, and realized that he preferred him to Sartre. His praise for Sartre's essays, that they go straight to "the essential point", is also true for most of the essays in Making Waves.
Sartre is a problematic character, perhaps even a father-figure for Vargas Llosa. John Dos Passos, whom Sartre so much admired and was influenced by, is dear to him as well, for more or less the same reasons: his lack of sentimentality and invention of narrative techniques. Vargas Llosa himself later used these techniques in his novels (as Sartre did). Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook is praised as a good example of a "committed" novel in the "Sartrean definition" of the term; that is, a book "rooted in the debates, myths and violence of its time". Of all the writers Vargas Llosa is genuinely interested in and wrote about - including Joyce, Hemingway, and Bataille - Faulkner is the one he has the highest praise for and admits to being heavily influenced by. Most of his comments on the formal in-genuity of Faulkner's novels, in an essay on Sanctuary, are relevant to his own novels as well. In fact, Vargas Llosa's observation that in Sanctuary the scenes are juxtaposed, rather than dissolving into each other, is even truer of his own fiction. This technique also appears in his new novel, Death in the Andes, which is crammed with voices, stories and comments, the continuity of which is ruthlessly broken.
Set in remote and isolated corners of the Andes, in decaying and desolate communities, empty valleys, mines, mountain roads, Death in the Andes tells the story of a series of disappearances, most of them possibly murders. The logic behind these killings is investigated by a corporal, Lituma, whose name will not be unfamiliar to the followers of Vargas Llosa's fiction, and his companion, a member of the Guardia Civil, Tomas Carreno. They interrogate people, wander around the country, tell each other stories of their love affairs and are constantly on the alert for an ambush by Maoist guerrillas. The people they meet, juxtaposed with the stories they tell, form a panoramic and realistic picture of rural Peru today, its misery and pain.
The suspects are members of Shining Path, Peru's Maoist guerrilla movement, and a strange local couple who are running a cantina and are seen performing ceremonies reminiscent of ancient Inca rituals. The description of the illogical brutality of various political murders by Shining Path, and the growing possibility that the murders may be related to some kind of Inca-inspired sacrificial rituals, produce an atmo-sphere of dark irrationalism, enhanced by the violent Andes landscape. Death is everywhere in this book, and its presence is felt more than the poverty, the guerrilla war, the nature and the hopelessness of Peru.
It is as if Vargas Llosa the modernist had lost his optimism, and, like a truly postmodern anthropologist, decided to pay attention to Peru's irrationalism, its violence, its pre-enlightenment values and rituals. Myths, ancestral gods, mountain spirits, demons, satan and witches are mentioned everywhere in the book, perhaps more than their presence in the story warrants. "But of course, we make a mistake when we try to understand these killings with our minds", says one character. "They have no rational explanation."
The texture of Death in the Andes is immune to the irrationalism it describes. Plotting a detective novel, a genre based on the celebration of Cartesian rationalism, together with the ir-rational atmosphere that hints at the hidden roots of brutality - these two contradictory objects do not help to produce a new form. This is, after all, a typical Vargas Llosa book; although occasionally complex, it is always controlled, and its voices are well orchestrated; the beauty and the strength of the novel is based on its tight and well organized composition.
While there is a strong intention to by-pass the worn-out modernistic as- sumptions about "Third World" countries in Death in the Andes, this is not a post-modern novel as , say, Gravity's Rainbow is. The image of "the other" as an irrational being, and all the other elements that are usually associated with this kind of reasoning - magic, rituals, strange landscapes and brutality - abound in the book. Yet one does not read it as a novel illustrating vulgar generalizations about "the other", but as a playful, often funny, realistic text that derives strength from its being a reliable chronicle of the real events that take place in everyday life in Peru. The capture of a small town by the guerrillas and the trials that follow, or a melo-dramatic love-affair between a prostitute and a soldier, have the plausibility of a convincing reportage. The Peru of Death in the Andes is a country "no one can understand", a place where everyone complains about his miserable salary and the stupidity of risking one's neck for it. Although he has always been experimental, Vargas Llosa is one of the most realistic of the Latin American writers.
The main character, Corporal Lituma, appears, Balzac/Faulkner fashion, in other Vargas Llosa novels. He was a major figure in Who Killed Palomino Molero?, which is also partly a detective novel, had two lives in The Green House, the novel named after a brothel, the establishment he remembers in Death in the Andes, and was an imaginary character who terrorized the underworld of El Callao in a soap opera, in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
The treatment of this down-to-earth figure, who does his best to serve in the army without any fanaticism, has a reasonable degree of honesty, strong instinct to survive and a cynical sense of humour, is very sympathetic. Vargas Llosa, who studied in a military high school in Peru, is at his best when writing about military life, as in the rivalry and competition of young cadets of The Time of the Hero or (at his most humorous) in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, a satire of bureaucracy and sex in the army. He is brilliant when he pays attention to the nuances of male friendships, the fragile moments of macho sensibilities, tough guys who hopelessly fall in love with whores, the right moment for a vulgar joke to end male senti-mentality that goes too far.
His cynicism can be extremely funny, yet it is never pointless. From his earlier novels, it is obvious that Vargas Llosa prefers wise realists and cynical moderates to radical utopians and fanatics. Here, the good guys are soldiers, while there is no attempt to understand the psychology of the Shining Path guerrillas, who are represented as purely illogical and almost absurdly evil.
This is not of course entirely unrelated to Vargas Llosa's own political change, well chronicled in Making Waves, from a young modernist Marxist enchanted by the Cuban revolution to a mature, self-conscious liberal, who in the early 1990s, counted himself as one of "the only two writers in the world who admire Margaret Thatcher and detest Fidel Castro", and who scolded Guenter Grass for saying in early 1980s that Latin American countries should follow "the example of Cuba". After reading the account of the Shining Path guerrillas in Death in the Andes, it is striking to come across, in one of the early articles, a touching and tender homage to a Marxist guerrilla, a friend who had died in 1965, "in an engagement with the Peruvian army". Do guerrillas cease to be human after our youth ends, or is it only because after a certain age we rarely have friends among the guerrillas? The charm of Vargas Llosa's writing and the vitality of his convictions are so engaging that one may tend to sympathize, if not with all of his political views, at least with his boyishly heartfelt way of relating to them.
"What does it mean to be a writer in Peru?" he asks in Making Waves, in an article on the early death of Sebasti n Salazar Bondy, one of the country's most successful authors. It is easy to identify with the fury of young Vargas Llosa, who says that every Peruvian writer is defeated in the end, not only because there are no readers and publishers in Peru, but because writers who resist and try to find ways of protecting themselves against "the poverty, the ignorance or the hostility of the environment" are treated as lunatics, destined either for an unreal existence or exile. His youthful hatred of the Peruvian bourgeoisie, who he said were "more stupid than the rest" and did not read books, his complaint that "Peruvian contributions" to world literature were scarce and poor, his dream of going to live in Europe, and the hunger he felt for non-Peruvian literature, are signs that beneath the singular voice of Vargas Llosa there is a painful awareness of being off-centre.
Source

Note: Bản in trong “Những sắc màu khác”, có hơi khác bản này.


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010

Mario Vargas Llosa và Văn học của Thế Giới Thứ Ba.
Orhan Pamuk

Liệu có thứ kêu là văn chương Thế Giới Thứ Ba? Liệu có thể sắp xếp cho ra, establish – mà không sợ biến thành trò tầm phào, hay nâng bi miệt vườn, đặc sản, parochialism - những đức tính, đạo hạnh cơ bản của những xứ sở mà chúng ta gọi là Thế Giới Thứ Ba?

Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa finds perfect protagonist in Roger Casement

Literature and Exile
Văn chương và Lưu vong

Every time that a Latin American writer resident in Paris is interviewed, one question invariably crops up: 'Why do you live outside your country?' This is not simple curiosity; in the majority of cases, the question conceals either fear or a reproach. For some, the physical exile of a writer is literally dangerous, because the lack of direct contact with the way of being or the way of speaking (which is almost the same thing) of the people of his own country can impoverish his language and weaken or falsify his vision of reality. For others, the matter has an ethical significance: to choose exile is immoral, a betrayal of the fatherland. In countries whose cultural life is limited or nonexistent, the writer - they think - should stay and fight for the development of intellectual and artistic activities to raise the spiritual level of the environment. If instead of doing so, he prefers to go abroad, then he is branded an egotist, an irresponsible person or a coward (or all three at once).
The writers' replies to this inevitable question are often very varied:
I live away from my country because I find the cultural milieu in Paris, London or Rome more stimulating; or because distance gives me a more coherent and faithful perspective on my reality than being immersed in it; or simply because I want to (I'm talking here about literary, not political, exiles). In fact all of these replies can be summed up in one: because I write better in exile. Better in this case should be understood in psychological and not aesthetic terms: it means with 'more tranquility' or 'greater conviction'; no one will ever know if what is written in exile is of better quality than what would have been written in one's own country. In answer to the fear that physical isolation from one's reality might prejudice one's work in the long run, the writer of fantasy might argue that the reality his fictions describe travels the world with him because his two-headed heroes, his carnivorous roses and his glass cities, emerge from his fantasies and dreams, not from any observation of the outside world. And he might add that the lack of daily contact with the language of his compatriots does not alarm him at all; he aspires to express himself in a language free of local color, an abstract, even exotic, unmistakably personal language, which can be developed through reading.
The realist writer must resort to examples. If we take just the case of Peruvian literature, we can come up with a list of important books which describe the face and the soul of Peru faithfully and beautifully, written by men who had spent a number of years in exile, thirty in the case of El Inca Garcilaso's Comentarios reales (Royal Commentaries) and at least twelve in the case of Vallejo's Poemas humanos (Human Poems). In both these examples - perhaps the most admirable in the whole of Peruvian literature - distance in time and space did not diminish or disturb the vision of a concrete reality which is transposed in essence into that chronicle and into those poems. In Latin American literature, the examples are even more numerous. Even if the literary value of Bello's odes might be debatable, his botanical and zoological rigor is not in question and the flora and fauna that he rhymed from memory in London correspond to those of America. Sarmiento wrote his best essays on his country, Facundo and Memorias de provincia (Notes from the Provinces), far from Argentina. No one doubts that the work of Marti is profoundly national, although four-fifths of it was written in exile. And was the costumbrist realism of the final novels of Blest Gana, written several decades after his arrival in Paris, no less faithful to Chilean reality than the books he wrote in Santiago?
This is simply a list of examples and the statistics in this case are there to give an indication rather than to present a rounded argument. Is it an indication that exile does not impair a writer's creativity and that physical absence from his home does not imply a loss, or a deterioration of the view of reality that his books seek to transmit? Any generalization on this theme risks drowning in absurdity. Because it would doubtless not be difficult to give numerous opposing examples to show how, in a great number of cases, when writers left their country, they lost their creativity or wrote books that deformed the world that they were attempting to describe. To these counter-statistics - we are already in the realm of the absurd - one would have to reply with another type of example which would show the countless number of writers who, without ever having touched foreign soil, wrote mediocre or inexact books about their country. And what about the writers of proven talent who, without going into exile, wrote works that do not reflect the reality of their country? Jose Maria Eguren did not need to leave Peru to describe a world populated by Nordic fairies and mysteries (like the Bolivian Jaime Freyres, and Julian del Casal who, while living in Cuba, wrote mainly about France and Japan). They did not go into exile physically, but their literature can be called 'exile' literature for the same reason as the literature of the exiled Garcilaso or Vallejo can be called literature 'rooted in a context'.
The only thing we've proved is that nothing can be proved in this area and that, therefore, in literary terms exile is not a problem in itself. It is an individual problem which takes on different characteristics with each writer and has different results. Physical contact with one's own rational reality means nothing from the point of view of the work; it determines neither a writer's themes, nor his imagination nor the vitality of his language. Exactly the same is true of exile. Physical absence from a country is sometimes translated into works that accurately reflect that reality and at other times into works that distort reality. Whether or not a work is an evasion or a reflection of reality, just as whether or not it is good, has nothing to do with the geographical location of its author.

That still leaves the moral criticism that some level at the writer who goes into exile. Surely the writers who desert their country show an indifference towards their own kind, a lack of solidarity with the dramas and people of that country? The question contains a confused and contemptuous idea of literature. A writer has no better way of serving his country than by writing with as much discipline and honesty as he can. A writer shows his discipline and honesty by placing his vocation above everything else and by organizing his life around his creative work. Literature is his first loyalty, his first responsibility, his primordial obligation. If he writes better in his country, he must stay there; if he writes better in exile, he must leave. It is possible that his absence might deprive his society of someone who might have been an effective journalist, teacher or cultural promoter, but it is equally possible that the journalist, teacher or cultural promoter is depriving society of a writer. It is not a question of knowing which is more important, more useful; a vocation (especially a writer's) cannot be decided in any authentic way by commercial, historical, social or moral criteria. It is possible that a young man who abandons literature to dedicate himself to teaching or fighting the revolution is ethically and socially more worthy of recognition than the other, the egotist, who only thinks about writing. But from the point of view of literature, a
generous person is by no means exemplary or, in any event, he sets a bad example because his nobility and heroism are also a betrayal. Those who demand that a writer behave in a certain way (something that they do not demand, for example, of a doctor or an architect) are in effect expressing an essential doubt about the usefulness of his vocation. They judge the writer by his customs, his opinions or the place where he lives and not by the only thing by which he can be judged: his books. They tend to value these books according to the life the author leads and it should be the other way round. Deep down, they do not believe that literature can be useful and they hide, their skepticism by keeping a suspicious (aesthetic, moral or political) watch on the writer's life. The only way to clear up these doubts would be by demonstrating that literature is worth something. The problem remains unresolved, however, since the usefulness of literature, although self-evident, is also unverifiable in practical terms.

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA


London, January 1968


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010

Landscape of Violence
Orhan Pamuk

Liệu có thứ kêu là văn chương Thế Giới Thứ Ba? Liệu có thể sắp xếp cho ra, establish – mà không sợ biến thành trò tầm phào, hay nâng bi miệt vườn, đặc sản, parochialism - những đức tính, đạo hạnh cơ bản của những xứ sở mà chúng ta gọi là Thế Giới Thứ Ba?

Literature and Exile
Văn chương và Lưu vong

Note: Bài viết trên giải thích, phần nào, thái độ của một số độc giả Mít, đối với những nhà văn lưu vong, mà lại viết bằng 1 thứ tiếng không phải tiếng Mít như Linda Lê.

Họ khư khư ôm lấy chân lý, nhà văn Mít thì phải viết bằng tiếng Mít, và dù sống ở đâu, thì cũng phải khư khư ôm lấy hình ảnh quê hương Mít!

Đây là tâm lý phát sinh từ chủ nghĩa quốc gia cực đoan, theo GNV. Khi được Nobel, Llosa phát biểu, Gấu nhớ đại khái, bây giờ tôi trở thành nhà văn của tất cả mọi quốc gia rồi!