Mario Vargas Llosa shoots Jorge Edwards: “He raised the bar for literature in Latin America”
Family, friends and colleagues mourn the death of Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, who died on Friday in Madrid at the age of 91. Among them is the writer Mario Vargas Llosa He wanted to pay tribute to the late author, and he did so by remembering one of his novels, Persona Non Grata. In statements to which the Prensa Ibérica group had access, Vargas Llosa noted that Edwards “is best known for a book about Cuba – ‘persona non grata’ – that he published in the 1970s, and in which he revealed his conversations with Fidel Castro and with what could be an opposition group that he associates with It already has a fairly close relationship.” According to Vargas Llosa, the book “impressed” him because it was the first to “deeply and firmly criticize the Cuban dictatorship”.
“Jorge admitted his insecurities, the fact that they took him for an unintentional walk and that he always felt like they might lose him,” makes him disappear. The book had a huge impact in Latin America but “it also contributed a lot to the dissemination of his novels,” Vargas Llosa recalled.
Vargas Llosa also stands out How Edwards went out of his way to tell about his personal experiences in his life Novels. “For example, he recently confessed that a priest – who was in a Jesuit school – raped him,” notes Vargas Llosa, and recounted this in a very stern manner, “how this priest was constantly going to his house to try to wake him up,” showing that he had a good impression of the religious order Regardless of this priest’s behavior. “That caused a shock.”
The importance of the writer in his time was very important, insists Vargas Llosa, and he was one of the architects who contributed more than others to the creation of the high levels that Latin American literature reached in those years.
The funeral chapel of Jorge Edwards, winner of the 1999 Cervantes Prize, will be installed tomorrow in the funeral home of La Paz, in the town of Alcobendas.
Writer and journalist, he was a Chilean academic of language and corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Literature collection, regular collaboration in Chilean and international newspapers, conferences and courses at American universities.
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Chile, Spain and France. Writing, politics, nonconformity and marginalization, as well as love as a driver of human action, were recurring themes and settings in Edwards’ work, which He was awarded the National Prize for Chilean Literature (1994) or the prestigious Cervantes Prize (1999) in Spain.
Apart from these awards, he has been awarded the Silver Pen at the Bilbao Book Fair (2008) for his career, the Ibero-American Planeta Casamarica Prize for Narrative for his novel “La casa de Dostoievsky” (2008), the International Prize of Valladolid Cristobal Gabarrón de las Letras Foundation ( 2009), or the González Ruano Prize for Journalism (2011), and in 2016 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise
