Mario Vargas Llosa Talks Trash About Sartre, Calls Faulkner “The Man”

On Monday night, Team Literary Man was generously invited to sit and listen to the great Mario Vargas Llosa hold court at the Americas Society and dish deep on the World Republic of Letters. What a treat, dear readers, to sit in an elegant, chandeliered oak-walled library and listen to Edith Grossman, Mario’s translator, ask the old Peruvian writer about his favorite books AND any writers who, he felt, no longer had anything to offer him. Such a rare question….

Vargas Llosa spoke fondly of his reverence for Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. He talked about how much he loved The Three Musketeers and Les Miserables, and how he sometimes feared re-reading such books because of how much he had initially enjoyed reading them. Edith Grossman agreed and said that he had recently struggled with Conrad’s Nostromo, to which Conrad replied, “That book isn’t any good! You chose poorly,” and everyone in the audience laughed. They agreed that Virginia Woolf sustained re-reading, particularly The Waves, Vargas Llosa noted. But Faulkner, really, he kept coming back to. He mentioned that he has read Light in August “probably more than 10 times.” Interestingly, it was Sanctuary that first hooked him on Faulkner (because of the complex uses of form and time) not The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying.

He recounted a trip he took to Faulkner’s home in Mississippi in which a Dutch tourist recognized him, Vargas Llosa, and said that it was because of a Vargas Llosa lecture on Faulkner that the Dutch reader had first heard of Faulkner and gone on to study him. The Dutch tourist bragged that he was “probably the foremost Faulkner authority in all of Holland....”

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