THE NEW NOVEL BY NOBEL PRIZE WINNER FOR LITERATURE MARIO VARGAS LLOSA The story of a man who dreamed of a country united by music and went crazy wanting to write a perfect book that would tell it Toño Azpilcueta spends his days between his job at a ...
THE NEW NOVEL BY NOBEL PRIZE WINNER FOR LITERATURE MARIO VARGAS LLOSA The story of a man who dreamed of a country united by music and went crazy wanting to write a perfect book that would tell it Toño Azpilcueta spends his days between his job at a school, his family and his great passion, Creole music, which he has been researching since his youth. One day, a call changes his life. An invitation to go listen to an unknown guitarist, Lalo Molfino, a character about whom no one knows much but who is extremely talented, seems to confirm all his thoughts: the deep love he feels for Peruvian waltzes, marineras, polkas and huainos has a reason beyond the pleasure of listening to them (or dancing to them). Perhaps what's happening is that Creole music is, in reality, not only a symbol of identity for an entire country and an expression of that very Peruvian attitude of huachafería ("Peru's greatest contribution to universal culture," according to Toño Azpilcueta), but something much more, an element capable of provoking a social revolution, of breaking down prejudices and racial barriers to unite the entire country in a fraternal and mestizo embrace. In a country fractured and ravaged by the violence of the Shining Path, music could be that which reminds all those who make up society that, above all else, they are brothers and compatriots. And in this, Lalo Molfino's guitar virtuosity may have a lot to do with it. Toño Azpilcueta decides to investigate more about Molfino, travel to his place of origin, get to know this elusive figure, learn about his story, his family and loves, and how he came to become such an excellent guitarist. He also intends to write a book that tells the story of Creole music and develops the idea that the discovery of this extraordinary musician has instilled in him. Fiction and essay thus masterfully intertwine in this novel, in which the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner returns to a theme that has obsessed him for years: utopias. This is what Toño Azpilcueta ultimately pursues: the utopia of generating, through art, an idea of the country. Critics have
"Mario Vargas Llosa's writing has shaped our image of South America and has its chapter in the history of contemporary literature. In his early years, he was a renovator of the novel; today, he is an epic poet."
Per Wastberg, President of the Nobel Committee: "Welcome [...] the great recreator of the realist novel, which we read with the same enthusiasm with which others read the imaginative excesses—also welcome—of magical realism."
J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia "His books contain the most complex, passionate, and persuasive vision of the novel and the novelist's craft that I know of; they also contain the greatest stimulus a novelist can find for writing, a stimulus second only to that contained in Vargas Llosa's novels."
Javier Cercas, El País
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