Français 
Deutsch 
Español 
Italiano Lima 
Things to see and do
Organise your stay
Lima, in the footsteps of Mario Vargas Llosa :
Nearby tourist sites
Nearby hotels
-
Country Club Lima Hotel from239 $
Book -
Lima Garden Hotel from88 €
Book -
Casa Bella San Isidro from75 $
Book
Lima, in the footsteps of Mario Vargas Llosa
Lima, in the footsteps of Mario Vargas Llosa
Daniel Duguay - 2011-05-24
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and essayist spent much of his youth in the city of Lima. With its famous university, its joyful working class neighbourhoods and its "speaking river” the city has always had an imposing influence on the writer’s work. Even now it still speaks of his first loves...
One evening in October 1983 Bernard Pivot made a prediction on the Apostrophes TV programme which was to come true twenty-seven years later. His guest at the time, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, ended up being crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. As the greatest Francophile amongst Latin American novelists (he has an avowed admiration for Hugo, Balzac and Camus) he has long taken taking a wicked pleasure in resisting the classifications and labels into which the literary critics attempted to pigeonhole his books. These days it seems they are defeated and resolve to calling him "a virtuoso of narrative," which is unlikely to displease Vargas Llosa and is enough to satisfy his readers.
Most of his novels, which take place in Peru, have been translated into English and published by Faber and Faber, making them easy to find. If you want to follow Vargas Llosa's footsteps in and around Lima then don't forget to slip into your suitcase the excellent road map of the country, published by Michelin. With a good fifteen hour flight, you’ll have plenty of time to work up some knowledge!
Most of his novels, which take place in Peru, have been translated into English and published by Faber and Faber, making them easy to find. If you want to follow Vargas Llosa's footsteps in and around Lima then don't forget to slip into your suitcase the excellent road map of the country, published by Michelin. With a good fifteen hour flight, you’ll have plenty of time to work up some knowledge!
A Political and Emotional Labyrinth
Lima’s old centre is adorned with numerous churches and convents, long rows of balconies adorning the facades of old houses and pompous buildings from the 1900s overloaded with cornices and stuccos. This city centre, unfortunately disfigured by ugly concrete blocks that sprung up during the 1970s, was the setting for the writer’s youth.
Nearby, strolling around the Plaza San Martin, Belen Street boasts a magnificent museum, the Andres del Castillo museum which includes pre-Inca ceramics from the Chancay culture. Also in Belen Street, number 1955 is home to the Radio Central studio where the young Vargas Llosa, having always dreamt of becoming a writer, met the colourful Bolivian Pedro Camacho, the tireless author of radio dramas which he acted out on air as soon as he had written them! During this same period, he fell in love with Julia, his aunt (by marriage) who was 14 years his senior and he married her a few years later on in Paris. This was an unprecedented scandal amongst the high society of Lima at the time. (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977).
Further afield near to the Puente del Ejercito which spans the muddy waters of the Rio Rimac, or Rio Hablador ("the Speaking River) in the decrepit and dusty district of Monserrate the freelance journalist Santiago Zavala (a pseudonym for Vargas Llosa himself who at the time was working in cinema sections of the magazine Literatura and the newspaper El Comercio) encountered the half-caste Ambrosio, a former driver for his father. He takes him to a local bistro and during a long interview Santiago discovers his father’s secrets. As a backdrop to this, details emerge of the goings on behind the scenes from the depraved dictatorship of General Odria, who governed Peru with an iron fist between 1948 and 1956 supported by a system which was corrupt from top to bottom. This weighty confession filled the 500 pages of Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), one of the author’s cult works. However don’t bother trying to find “The Cathedral” for this cafe no longer exists. Moreover the Monserrate district becomes rather dark and seedy when night falls…
So let’s move on to the more inviting area of Miraflores, which has become the centre of Lima’s movida. The Avenue Larco has a throng of prêt a porter clothes shops, chic cafes and luxury hotels. In the evening, the bars and nightclubs attract gringos like fireflies. The Miraflores of the 1950s was a quiet neighbourhood with the faded colours of a happy past of opulent villas where frivolous carefree youth cavorted. It was a sort of adolescent paradise lost and Llosa speaks of it in the first chapter of The Bad Girl (2006), a surrealist novel of mad love.
You can find signs of this forgotten Miraflores (prior to Llosa’s modernist transformation during the 1960s) on the streets parallel to the main thoroughfare of Avenida Larco. A few villas with gardens shaded by fig and jacaranda trees, half hidden under deluges of jasmine and bougainvillea, have become luxury hotels that are a lot more affordable and welcoming than the large five star hotels that have grown all around. Further down the avenue, we arrive at Parque Salazar, which is built on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. The beautiful view stretches across the Bay of Lima, from the beaches at Chorrillos to La Punta. The young lovers at the beginning of the novel often go walking there at dusk. And just when the ball of fire gets engulfed by the clouds and disappears into the ocean, they make a vow. "Evidently it was always the same.” (The Bad Girl.)
USEFUL INFORMATION
For more information on Lima and Peru: http://www.aboutlima.com/
You can find signs of this forgotten Miraflores (prior to Llosa’s modernist transformation during the 1960s) on the streets parallel to the main thoroughfare of Avenida Larco. A few villas with gardens shaded by fig and jacaranda trees, half hidden under deluges of jasmine and bougainvillea, have become luxury hotels that are a lot more affordable and welcoming than the large five star hotels that have grown all around. Further down the avenue, we arrive at Parque Salazar, which is built on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. The beautiful view stretches across the Bay of Lima, from the beaches at Chorrillos to La Punta. The young lovers at the beginning of the novel often go walking there at dusk. And just when the ball of fire gets engulfed by the clouds and disappears into the ocean, they make a vow. "Evidently it was always the same.” (The Bad Girl.)
USEFUL INFORMATION
For more information on Lima and Peru: http://www.aboutlima.com/
