¿Cómo puede una novela cambiar el mundo? ¿Todavía conservan los libros el poder de cambiar la realidad y a los hombres? Dos maestros de la literatura mundial contemporánea intentan responder a esta dificilísima pregunta, revelando los secretos de su «taller de escritura». Invitando a Claudio Magris y Mario Vargas Llosa a confrontar sus respectivas ideas sobre la literatura como «experiencia total», Renato Poma, director del Instituto Italiano de Cultura de Lima, subraya el sólido vínculo que existe entre el premio Nobel peruano y el más prestigioso intelectual y escritor italiano: ambos creen que la misión principal de la literatura es la de indagar en esa tierra misteriosa e intrincada que es el espíritu humano, en sus más arcanos resortes y en sus contradicciones, con el propósito de ayudarnos a comprender el caos en que se haya sumida nuestra existencia. Según Vargas Llosa, en efecto, un libro está logrado cuando es capaz de arrancarnos de la corriente concitada de nuestras vidas y nos arrastra hacia un mundo donde la ficción aparece más tangible y real que la realidad misma, y este movimiento de creación y de espejo nos permite orientarnos mejor y comprender algo más de nosotros mismos. Claudio Magris, desde su privilegiado punto de vista de escritor de los límites, nos muestra hasta qué punto la literatura es un lugar medial, un espacio abierto donde se encuentran la capacidad creativa del escritor para inventarse mundos y, a la vez, su inagotable tensión hacia la verdad. En este diálogo breve y fulminante, dos de los más importantes intelectuales y escritores de nuestro tiempo confiesan la relación íntima y apasionada que los une a lo que les resulta más querido y que, de manera tan decisiva, ha marcado sus vidas. Para llegar a una común e implacable conclusión: la literatura tiene la tarea ineludible de hundir sus afiladas hojas en el mundo e intentar cambiarlo.
Authors
Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru in 1936, is the author of some of the most significant writing to come out of South America in the past fifty years. His novels include The Green House, about a brothel in a Peruvian town that brings together the innocent and the corrupt; The Feast of the Goat, a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo’s insidious regime; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a comedic semi-autobiographical account of an aspiring writer named Marito Varguitas, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucho. He is also a widely read and respected essayist, writing everything from newspaper opinion pieces to critical works on other writers, including The Perpetual Orgy on Flaubert. Vargas Llosa is also active outside the literary arena, and was a serious contender for the presidency of Peru in 1990 (eventually losing to the now disgraced Alberto Fujimori), an experience he documented in his memoir, A Fish in the Water. On the controversial nature of some of his work he said, “The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.” He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2010, "for his cartography of structures of power & his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". http://us.macmillan.com/author/mariov...
Claudio Magris was born in Trieste in the year 1939. He graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978. His most well knwon book is Danubio (1986), which is a magnum opus. In this book Magris tracks the course of the Danube from its sources to the sea. The whole trip evolves into a colorful, rich canvas of the multicultural European history. He's translated the works of Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler, among others, and he published also essays about Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Hesse and many others.
