Word: llosa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Drama Contemporary volume includes short plays by leading architects of the New Realism: Manuel Puig, Antonio Skarmeta, Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as Fuentes, who will resume teaching here as a visiting professor next year. The startling newness of the plays does not emanate from tinsel and glitter but from evocative use of the past. The writers use the symbols of the past to understand the present and as sign posts to a hopeful future...
...Llosa's play Kathie and the Hippopotamus is itself about writing. Kathie and Santiago, the main characters, create their fiction out of the material and people of their pasts. As the characters of the past appear and hold discussions with the writers, time ceases to consist of events stacked neatly one upon another...
Skarmeta, like Llosa, chooses a writer--Chilean poet-hero Pablo Neruda--as his protagonist. The lines vibrate with metaphor. Poetry intermingles with the text of the play in a way that emphasizes the living spirit of Neruda in the hearts of revolutionaries...
DESPITE THEIR brilliance, Llosa and Skarmeta seem to strain for metaphors and one-liners. ("Let's not carry democracy to the point of taking a vote to see who our father is," says Skarmeta's ever-composing Neruda.) On stage, an actor's delivery might compensate for much of the stiffness, but in print, it is trying...
...intensity of her needs that ensures her greatness as a literary character, a point that elicits wholehearted sympathy from Vargas Llosa, who as an outspoken young writer and Peruvian hotspur once caused quite a stir in conservative Lima. "It is not only the fact that Emma is capable of defying her milieu," he writes, "but also the causes of her defiance that force me to admire that elusive little nobody. These causes are very simple and stem from something that she and I share intimately: our incurable * materialism, our greater predilection for the pleasures of the body than for those...