Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa died at age 89 in 2025. His massive literary output during his career included novels, nonfiction, essays, plays and poems. He has been awarded the prestigious Miguel de Cervantes Prize and in 2010 the Nobel Prize for Literature. Peter Englund, Secretary of the Swedish Academy, cited Llosa as “one of the great Latin American storytellers – a master of dialogue who has been searching for the elusive concept known as the total novel, and who believes in the power of fiction to improve the world.” Citing Llosa’s “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”
Llosa final novel “I Give You My Silence,” written in 2022, is exemplar of his signature themes of Peruvian diasporic Latin culture. The novel is out now in a fine-line English translation by Adrian Nathan West.
The novel is a journeyman saga of Toño Azpilcueta, a Peruvian writer on a mission to document the true history of his country’s lore and love of the vals, long thought of as a spinoff the 19th century European waltz, but Toño believes its European origins are exaggerated. He asserts that vals musicality is “of Spanish or Austrian origin, or perhaps both, engendered dances in Chile and Argentina as well as in Peru. But it was only in Peru that huachaferia appeared: an exaggeration of sentiment, a verbal styling, that I believe to be Peru’s most significant contribution to world culture.” And adding to the mix is a huge chamber of creole fusion.
The distinct musicality expressed through guitar, percussion, indigenous songs and dances which define Peruvian life across classes, ethnicities, and heard in parlors, dancehalls, concert halls and nationwide in streets and back alleys and expresses the national character. Toño believing thatthe vals is a culturally unifying art that brings all people together despite one’s occupation, social status, political or religious beliefs.
Over his career as a music journalist he worked feverishly often with little or no pay covering the artform wherever it takes him.
But his singular field of knowledge is upended one night, when he attends a concert and hear for the first time a young guitarist named Lalo Molfino taking the stage performing a solo set. Toño is bowled over by his interpretive artistry and technical virtuosity is in a category of his own.
Toño immediately wanted to meet and interview the guitarist, but Lalo vanishes after the concert and the concert host tell him that the young man was now on tour with a group.
Though he was already known for being difficult, so off-putting that he refused to perform with other musicians, demanding that he only perform as a soloist.
Tono attempts to track him down on the tour, only to find out he has died. In despair Toño decides to write a biography of Molfino. A friend lends him money to former college loans him the money to fund the project. He tracks down people in the guitarist’s birthplace only to find out that he was abandoned by his mother and left in a rat-invested garbage dump and an Italian priest rescues him and eventually even adopts him. At some point, young Lalo finds a busted up guitar, restores it, and teaches himself to play, an apparent musical savant.
While his quest to find out everything he can about the music and the musician, Toño has debilitating psychotic episodes where he thinks rats are literally falling on his back and attacking him. He seeks out a psychiatrist who suggests to him that it might be traced to some childhood emotional or physical trauma.
After tearing up many drafts of his Molfino biography Toño is finally satisfied he has written “clear ideas about the proper way to tell this story of the elusive life of Lalo Molfino accompanied by a major essay on the culture and customs of Peru.” Perhaps a mirroring Roman a clef of Llosa?
The pace of it sometimes strikes as a shaggy dog story, at times seeming narratively adrift. Its wending attention on factoids of musicians, singers, composer land like musicological sidebars about the vales, its history so detailed that Llosa’s stylizations slouch toward academic filler.
Making brief appearances in the book are Toño’s devoted wife Matilde and their two young daughters. The narrative pulse of the book returns mid-way through as Toño’s musical quest has him traveling valiantly for information about Mofino. When he tracks down Lalo’s girlfriend, Manuela and interviews her for the book and the story shifts into high gear and a happy development for the harried Toño.
But that aside, Llosa paints a luminous portrait of a diverse Peruvian culture as vivid locales as the journey of Toño quest for knowledge is a fevered dream (echoes of Cervantes) of frustration, paranoia, and ultimately, personal triumph and inevitable defeat.
Llosa’s narrative structure that bounces back and forth from 1st and 3rd person perspective can be jarring. He knew he was terminally ill when he was writing what would be his last book. ‘I Give You My Silence’ is prismatic, satiric and altogether deadly serious portrait of the heart and soul of Llosa’s beloved country as he challenges readers to keep up with its author. Cue Vals!
