Mario Vargas Llosa, Immortal

By Consuelo Sáizar de la Fuente

Mario Vargas Llosa has been admitted today to the French Academy, that is, he has been recognized by his peers with what his readers -and the countless prizes, including the Nobel Prize- had already granted him for decades: that which we call immortality.

He is the first writer to enter the French Academy -founded in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu-, who does so without an original work in French but with a passion that began in the mid-fifties of the last century, and that was consolidated in his first trip to the city of light in January 1958, as a prize for having won first place in a contest organized by "La Revue Française", with a story called "The Challenge", which would later appear in The Bosses, the first of his books, published in 1958.