Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa

What interested you most about the Rolex Arts Initiative and influenced you to participate in the programme?

I was very curious about the idea of working with a protégé. I’ve never done that before. I was curious to see if the working relationship could give me insights into my own work. No two writers are alike: the work is the projection of one’s personality. This project offered a special opportunity to work closely with a writer on a creative project.

Do you think the passing down of artistic knowledge to younger generations is the duty of a successful artist?

I think that the duty of an artist is to be creative, rigorous, authentic – not to lie. Write whatever novel you like, it’s never the objective truth. The writer’s truth is his own. Who you are, what you believe: you must be loyal to your vision of the world. Do this, and you’ve fulfilled your duty. But it’s valuable to share what one has learned with younger writers so that literature will continue to be an important force in society. In literature we have a problem today. Light literature has taken over, literature that wants only to be pure entertainment. Of course literature must be entertainment or it is nothing. But literature that wants only to be entertainment is doomed. It can’t compete with the audio-visual media. Literature has to have its own point of view – a critical point of view on the times and society. It’s important to fight to keep this concept alive at a time when literature is threatened by frivolity.

Is there a difference between a teacher and a mentor? If so, what do you think the main difference is?

I think this will be much more private than teaching at a university or an academy. I don’t think you can teach how to write a novel or a poem. What you can do is share your personal experiences as a writer in order to help a young writer to discover his own voice, his own literary goals and maybe help him with some reviews, with some books, authors, or ideas that helped you a lot when you started as a writer.

Did you have a mentor and what influence did he/she have on your career and work?

That’s an interesting question. Maybe some friends at university, students who like me in those years wanted very much to become writers one day. I think it was in conversations with them, exchanging books with them, that I learned about my vocation and I did my first literary training. Probably I learned from these friends, young fellow writers more than in the literary classes at university. But of course the major mentors were certain writers. I think in the early 1950s it was French and American literature. The “Lost Generation”: Hemingway, Dos Passos, in my case Faulkner. I think Faulkner was the first writer I read with a pen and a piece of paper, trying to devise the way in which he organised time, space, points of view.

What made you choose Antonio García Ángel as your Protégé from among the finalists? What made him suitable for this programme and to work with you?

He has published just one novel and some short stories. I very much liked his first novel. It’s set in Bogotá, it’s written well and, I think we can say, in a humorous way. But behind all this extravagance and humour there is a very serious problem which is described with insight and literary cleverness. I found also in his short stories a personal world, and also something which I think is very, very important in a young writer: ambition – the propensity to bear difficult things.

Is there a similarity between your approach to literature and that of your Protégé? Is this important to your work together?

I think there is a similarity. Antonio is ambitious. He doesn’t just want to be successful – which in itself is a legitimate desire. He also wants to be important – and this is essential for a young writer. It vastly increases the chances that he will be good. Antonio is very young, and he hasn’t read all the writers from whom I’ve learned a lot of the novelist’s craft, so I can give him suggestions in that direction. But another thing that’s important in this kind of work is empathy between the people involved. And that exists in this case: he’s friendly, open, easy to work with.