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5.0étoiles sur 5
A Political Man of the World, Aoû 20 2003
Most columnists, at least most American columnists, tend to specialize. They write on politics or art or culture or economics. But Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist ("Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter") and essayist ("Making Waves"), refuses to be pinned down. In the "Touchstone" column he writes for Spain's major newspaper, Vargas Llosa laments the demise of the British Reading Room with the same conviction and assurance with which he lambastes the leadership of the Chiapas rebels in Mexico or celebrates the erotic abandon of Rio's four-day Carnaval.Vargas Llosa has been writing his column since 1977 and this second collection includes columns from 1992 to 2000. The title, which comes from a tribute to fellow writer and "intellectual agitator" Octavio Paz, is a fitting one. Not that Vargas Llosa could ever be accused of hot headedness. Though he does tend to describe destructive elements on the extreme right or left as "idiots" or "absolute idiots," his impassioned opinions are informed by 60 years of global travel, observation, reading and thought. His politics can be described fairly simply - he believes in secular democracy and the free market. Socially he is moderately liberal. But those simple terms embrace a host of cogent arguments and ironic observations from around the world. Vargas Llosa relishes irony and contrast. There is amusement in his vivid description of the bejeweled rich who paid big money to sit enraptured at a lavish production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's masterpiece of anti-capitalism, "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. A bitter irony is found in the appropriation of the liberal argument for multiculturalism in defense of the abhorrent practice of female "circumcision" among immigrants to Western countries. More baffling is the contrast found in a thoughtful intellectual known for penetrating literary criticism and subtle reflections on the various world religions, whose 1939-45 "Journal," is filled with an obsessive anti-Semitism that "lingers like a noxious miasma in the reader's memory, like the stink of cheap brothels, the smell of sharp tobacco, dirty feet, and rue-water that cannot be washed away or masked with dousings of cologne." He pokes fun at those who proclaim the death of literature and the demise of culture, like the French functionaries who believe "that languages must be shut up in concentration camps and guarded by flics and mouchards disguised as lexicographers". He rails against those who would preserve their culture with hate mongering or use their religion to deny others their human rights (particularly women). But the most moving and inspiring pieces are his brief portraits of the people he admires, like methodical Vermeer's passionate perfection, Monet's obsessive search at the end of his career to paint the elusive qualities of reality, Frida Kahlo's "Painting to Survive." One of the best is his evocation of Nelson Mandela from a visit to his prison at Robben Island. Another, completely different, is his discussion of V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux upon the publication of Theroux's compulsively readable savaging of his former friend, "Sir Vidia's Shadow," which Vargas Llosa concludes with a perfect personal anecdote. Vargas Llosa writes about anything he pleases anywhere in the world - the Catholic Church, Islam, Palestine, Latin America, books, art, music, history. He writes about a romance writer who lived life entirely in her imagination and an Andean maiden mummy who "testifies - depending on how you look at it - to the ceremonial riches and the mysterious beliefs of a lost civilization, or to the infinitely cruel ways in which human stupidity once exorcised its fears, and often still does." Though necessarily brief, each piece is well shaped and elegantly argued. Whether celebrating or fulminating, Vargas Llosa is intellectually rigorous and passionately engaged, a man of the world in the best sense. This is a collection that will be of interest to anyone with reasoned opinions, whatever their political slant.
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