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Mario Vargas Llosa: Marquez is dead to me

This week’s Maclean’s has an interview with Latin American author Mario Vargas Llosa, who has a new novel (The Bad Girl) out this fall. The article is an entertaining read, mostly because interviewer Isabel Vincent expends a considerable amount of effort trying (and failing) to get the author to call Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez the worst thing that ever happened to the region.

Llosa is reasonably chatty and forthcoming throughout, sharing his opinions on authoritarianism, Latin American politics, and the writing life, at least until Vincent’s final question:

What about Gabriel García Márquez, who is, like you, a literary giant in Latin America? You used to be good friends until you punched him out in a Mexican theatre in 1976. Neither you nor he have ever spoken about the feud, which has become one of the legendary battles of contemporary literature. Although you haven’t spoken for more than 30 years, you share the same agent [the legendary Carmen Balcells in Barcelona], and you recently agreed to allow part of your own book on García Márquez to be used as the introduction to a new edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America. Does this mean that there is a rapprochement with García Márquez on the horizon?

I don’t answer questions about that.

(Photo courtesy of the author’s official website, http://www.mvargasllosa.com/)

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