An Exceptional Experience
In 2004, for the first time in his life, the leading Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, agreed to be the mentor to a young writer. Here he describes his personal experience of the year of mentoring and how it inspired him.
When the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative proposed that I mentor a young author, I was initially somewhat reluctant to accept. While I have taught literature and delivered countless lectures on my work as a fiction writer – two activities that I have always found stimulating – I suspected that the proposed task was more delicate and more difficult. After all, it entailed nothing less than advising or counselling a budding writer in that most intimate of endeavours: the crafting of a novel. Nevertheless, I agreed, inspired by the challenge of experiencing something altogether different. I also had an intuition that it could possibly be more of a learning experience for me than for the protégé. I was not mistaken.
A committee composed of writers and critics shortlisted three candidates from all my potential protégés. It was then left to me to choose which of the three young people I would mentor. I chose Antonio García Ángel, from Colombia. From reading his stories and meeting him, I felt my experience could be of more use to him than to the two other young authors who gave me the impression of being more confessed, with very decided ideas about what they hoped to achieve as writers.
From the beginning, my intention was very clear. In no way would I attempt to impose my literary ideas or working methods on my protégé. Rather would I help him discover his own and find the approach best suited to his personality and literary aspirations.
I believe the rapport between mentor and protégé can prove creative only if there is a reciprocal flow of friendship and affinity between the two, which turned out to be the case between Antonio and me from the start. We got along famously from our very first conversation in my home in Lima, and we enjoyed sharing stories, reminiscing, discussing books and authors that had had a profound impact on us and confessing our respective fears and favourites in literature.
Although I have spent over half a century writing stories – in novels and plays – the process whereby fiction is created continues to be a strange and wonderful mystery to me. That is because it is never a product of pure reason. I am convinced that, even in the case of those writers who exercise more rational or conscious control over their literary creation, spontaneous and irrational factors inevitably intervene, often decisively so, whenever they craft a novel or play. I say that because it has always been the case with me. Even for those stories that seemingly take shape very clearly in my head and appear to follow a very coherent plan, once I am at the decisive moment of writing, the structure, devised with such certainty, invariably undergoes profound changes, involuntary ones resulting from intuitions or elements of chance that surface in the course of my work and alter the initial plan, sometimes without my realising it or my being able to avoid it.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the year I spent working with Antonio García Ángel, watching him write the brilliant novel that ultimately became Recursos Humanos, was following, step-by-step, this progress replete with the surprises, the unexpected and the discoveries that are the stuff writing fiction is made of. Over the 12 months we spent many weeks together, in different cities: Lima, London, Paris, Madrid. The rest of the time we communicated, on a weekly basis, either by phone or through letters in which I commented on the texts and ideas he would send me. I can truly say that I have been a privileged witness of the entire gestation of his novel, from the first seeds he planted during our initial encounter until the final version of the completed manuscript.
I found the experience fascinating. His first idea was simple, original and entertaining. A bureaucratic mix-up in a large corporation, during one of its periodic restructuring processes, leaves a low-grade employee outside the company’s organisational chart, forgotten by all of the divisions and sections. But he keeps receiving a salary and maintaining an office, altogether overlooked by his bosses and colleagues. This ghost of sorts, an exile in his own company, starts to lead a parasitic and near-invisible existence, going to work religiously each day, with nothing to do, and filling his time with increasingly personal and pointless activities. At one level, the story was rife with humour and embroidered with absurd touches. At another, it was a harsh and comic critique of bureaucracy and its deformities and the growing regimentation and inhumanity of postmodern industrial society.
Antonio had a gift for imagining ludicrous situations and expressing himself with both an economy of words and generous doses of wit and irony. But he was somewhat disorganised and tended to write when the spirit moved him. I advised him to try working in a more disciplined and systematic fashion, starting by drafting a general outline of the story and defining how this plan would be divided into sections, episodes and chapters. Naturally, the plan did not have to be written in stone. Far from it. He could change it as often as he saw fit. But it would help him to move on and find the narrative centre around which the story was organised. He did just that, until he had a quite complete outline of the novel. And, before he set pen to paper, we had long conversations about what, in my opinion, are the two key issues an author must resolve when writing a novel: the narrative point of view – who is/are the narrator/s – and the organisation of the narrative tense and time, a literary device as important as the intervention of the narrator in the narration. Every week Antonio sent me what he had written, based on his plan which contained, in broad terms, the story he intended to tell.
A few weeks into the novel, I noticed that, even without Antonio fully realising it, a secondary character from his story – another company employee, who started out as nothing more than padding – was starting to take shape, and that his vicissitudes, racy and foul language, complicated sex life and domestic circumstances were beginning to overshadow the experiences of the central character. To the point of displacing the latter and becoming the nucleus of the story. Not that the phantom employee disappeared: he became of lesser importance, like a backdrop that would give the first, realist plane of the novel an eccentric, absurd, delirious and almost fantastic dimension. I say almost because, in the final analysis, contrary to what Antonio had intended at the outset, his is not what we would call a “fantastic” novel. By the same token, it is not realistic in the most common sense of the word, as when a story appears to faithfully reproduce the everyday reality we know through experience. The truth is Recursos Humanos takes place in a complex, multifaceted reality, grounded in perfectly familiar, everyday experiences, but punctuated with unusual events and characters and outlandish occurrences, which at times borders on the fantastic because of unexpected twists and turns and exaggerated humour. This type of realism, infused with imagination and humour, accounts for the book’s main appeal and originality.
In no way did my work entail correcting what Antonio had written: simply commenting on what he had produced like a diligent reader keen on checking every last detail, scrutinising each episode with a veritable spate of questions to see if this method would incite its author to venture a little further with the linguistic gymnastics and picturesque details that colour each step of his story.
There are probably no two writers alike in the world. Each has his own compendium of idiosyncrasies and phobias, obsessions and scruples, fantasies and passions that make him unique, independent of greater or lesser similarities with others. I believe the greatest service a mentor can grant a protégé is to help him find his voice and attempt not to impose his own. One thing Antonio and I discovered from working together was how different we are in many ways. And it is precisely these differences that invigorated our chats and discussions. I am very happy to have been able to introduce him to some books and authors he barely knew, and I am grateful to him in turn for having made me read a number of young writers of his generation whose names I had heard only in passing.
If I had to take stock of this year, I would say it was a period of learning for both of us. And, for me, it was rejuvenating and stimulating. Thanks to my friend and apprentice, I was able to recapture the halcyon years of my youth when I took my first steps into that unknown world of the novelist, stumbling time and time again upon untold obstacles, yet full of hope and insatiable yearning to emulate those authors whose books had enriched my life, and my dreams, beyond measure.
For me it is truly a source of much pride to have been the first reader of Recursos Humanos, a novel worthy of a place in the most discerning libraries, and to have gained, thanks to this experience, an exemplary friend and confrère. There is no doubt in my mind that a prolific and successful literary career awaits Antonio García Ángel.
Lima, May 2007