Arts & Lectures
2001-2002 Season Lecture Series News Release
For Immediate Release

January 15, 2002
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@sa.ucsb.edu

Latin American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa delivers the lecture “History, the Future and the Writer’s Obligation” at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the brightest lights of Latin American fiction, will deliver the lecture “History, the Future and the Writer’s Obligation” on Wednesday, February 20 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. A Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the UCSB College of Creative Studies, the lauded Peruvian writer has published 14 novels including Aunt Julia and the Script Writer, The War of the End of the World and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. Vargas Llosa’s most recent novel The Feast of the Goat is a searing fictional portrait of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. Declaring the book part of a “small pantheon of classic Latin American novels anatomizing the perils and perquisites of absolute power,” The New York Times concluded, “Mr. Vargas Llosa has pushed the boundaries of the traditional historical novel, and in so doing has written a book of harrowing power and lasting emotional resonance.”

Vargas Llosa has also taken his obligation as a citizen seriously, having campaigned for president of Peru in 1990. Believing he could help lead his impoverished and terror-wracked homeland, he offered a vision of a free-market economy, but lost a bitter and violent election to Alberto Fujimori, who two years later seized dictatorial powers in the country. Although Fujimori no longer rules Peru, Vargas Llosa remains in self-imposed exile, choosing to live in London.

Having renounced the life of a politician, Vargas Llosa remains politically committed through his writing. He established his beliefs about the power of writing in the 1984 essay “Is Fiction the Art of Living?” which concludes: “Leading lives through fiction that one does not live in reality is a source of anxiety, a maladjustment to existence that can turn into rebelliousness, an unsubmissive attitude toward the establishment. One can well understand why regimes that seek to exercise total control over life mistrust works of fiction and subject them to censorship. Emerging from one’s own self, being another, even in illusion, is a way of being less a slave and of experiencing the risks of freedom.”

In addition to his novels, Vargas Llosa has written several plays, numerous essays (some of which are collected in 1997’s Making Waves) and the memoir A Fish in the Water, published in 1994. The memoir focuses on his early years growing up in Peru and Bolivia, his strained relationship with his father and his first forays into the world of letters as a journalist and novelist, and then skips ahead to the period of life when he ran for the Peruvian presidency. The book helps limn the creation of a major writer, one the Houston Chronicle states is “already regarded along with Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes as one Latin America’s three greatest living novelists.”

This lecture by Mario Vargas Llosa is presented by the College of Creative Studies, UCSB Arts & Lectures, the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and the Latin American & Iberian Studies Program. Tickets, $6 for the general public and $5 for UCSB students, are available at the Arts & Lectures Ticket Office and will be sold at the door the night of the lecture, beginning at 7 p.m., if available.

Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Mario Vargas Llosa will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.

©2002 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara