[
Ignacio Solares
AN INTERVI EW WITH
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
Man lives simultaneously in two worlds: the given world
and the world he himself invents, the world of imagination. For the
artist, the relationship between these worlds is necessarily ambigu–
ous. Where does one begin and the other end? Those writers imbued
with a vision that aspires to totality go even further. For them the
world of imagination contains all the elements of the given world and
more. In the context of Latin American literature, where so many
writers have limited themselves to formal matters, to the creation of
texts intended as codes to be deciphered, the author pursuing that
total vision is Mario Vargas Llosa. From his first novel,
La ciudad
y
los perros
[
The Time of the Hero
1
to his most recent work,
La guerra del
fin del mundo [The War at the End
oj
the World],
he has constantly ex–
panded his point of view, making it more complex, casting his net of
concerns wider and wider in order to catch that elusive totality com–
posed of the real and the imaginary.
He told me about his first attempts at writing.
MVL:
Among the earliest things I ever wrote, the most significant, I
think, was a notebook full of remarks on Faulkner. I was very
young then and lived with some aunts. In the rich solitude of
youthful reading, I began to cultivate a personal world, a world I
have never abandoned. On the contrary, I live in it more and
more every day.
At that age, around fifteen, he read a book that also turned out
to be decisive in his development,
War and Peace.
He read it in a sin–
gle, febrile, virtually sleepless week. The world of invention began to
envelop the future writer.
MVL:
Later I sat down to write with the same passion with which I
had read, smoking three packs of cigarettes. I finished at dawn,
totally broken down physically and mentally. Now I understand
that physical health is essential for aesthetic creation, so I don't
Editor's Note: This interview was translated from the Spanish by Alfred J.
MacAdam. It first appeared in
Vuet/a,
the Mexican cultural publication edited by
Octavio Paz, inJune 1982.
