Continental Shifts

In March 2017 Mario Vargas Llosa travelled from his home in Madrid, Spain, to Arequipa, Peru, where he was born. After celebrating his eighty-first birthday in the city of his birth, Vargas Llosa returned to Madrid, then left for Chicago to give four hour-long lectures, delivered in English, without notes, on the gestation of his major novels. He flew to Buenos Aires for a book fair, then travelled to Paris for an onstage interview in French before more than a thousand people at the Collège de France. The occasion of his visit to France was the publication of his complete works in La Pléiade, the compact leather-bound editions that certify a classic of world literature. Later in 2017, Vargas Llosa launched a book of essays based on lectures given at Princeton University; travelled to Chile to support the conservative candidate in its presidential election, even while he harangued Chilean conservatives for their “cave-dweller” attitudes to women and reproductive policy...