Vargas Llosa, Julian Barnes and Flaubert Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria)

A full hall. Half the seats taken already an hour before. And now, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa sits on the podium cutting, in the subdued light, an image of a cultured man; slick hair, oiled and parted but all grey now, even his thick eyebrows, smiling in the fashion peculiar to him. Vargas Llosa, now 76, is one of two Nobel Laureates from South America and is here, in the Colombian seaside town of Cartegena at the Hay Festival to talk about French writer Gustave Flaubert, author of the famous Madame Bovary, alongside English writer and Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes. Both writers have been heavily influenced by the French realist novelist. Perhaps heavily is an understatement. Barnes, sitting in a grey suit, hair swept away from his face speaking with a distinct British accent is one of Britain’s most celebrated author’s. One of his most famous novels, Flaubert’s Parrot follows the life of an English doctor exploring France to find the parrot that had once sat on Flaubert’s desk as he wrote. Barne’s life may not be as melodramatic as Vargas Llosa’s, something you would imagine Flaubert, if he had been alive, would have loved to write about. So, Vargas Llosa, having come later in life, wrote about the French novelist, or more precisely about his most famous book. His 1975 essay “The Perpetual Orgy” concerned itself with Flaubert’s style, writing process and execution of the novel Madame Bovary. The title, The Perpetual Orgy is not outrageously dramatic when you consider that when Flaubert wrote his classic novel in 1856 it was considered sexually explicit and had most of France in a state of excitement. The story of the adulterous Madame Bovary was even branded obscene and Flaubert was dragged to court by public prosecutors. The case only made the book even more famous and liberated the arts of writing from the shackles of conservative thinking and opening, in the process, new vistas for other writers to explore. Vargas Llosa, for instance, is famous for the explicit content of his novels, among other things. Interestingly, Mr. Barnes, on reading Vargas Llosa’s essay, wrote this for The New York Times “Most of The Perpetual Orgy... is a discussion of the genesis, execution, structure and technique of Madame Bovary. It is the best single account of the novel I know.” Vargas Llosa and Barnes are internationally acclaimed writers. Both are more prolific already than the French writer was in all his life. So one wonders why this perpetual infatuation with a writer born at least half a century before they were born.

Con el apoyo de Red Assist , Cartago Foundation y Secretaría de Cultura de Barranquilla . Colaboran con la iniciativa el Hay Festival , el Festival de Música de Cartagena , Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano , la Organización Ardila Lülle , KienyKe.com y el Carnaval de Barranquilla .