I GIVE YOU MY SILENCE

A parting novel, short and brooding, by the late Nobel Prize–winning author.

The Peruvian writer and sometime politician Vargas Llosa (1936-2025) intended to end his writing career with a study of Jean-Paul Sartre, “who was my master when I was a young man.” This novel, however, was his last work, and it owes something to the bleaker existential literature, with perhaps a nod to Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé as a study of a man driven bonkers by books and ideas. The man in question is Toño Azpilcueta, “a scholar of creole music” who had given most of his life to collecting records and and being badly paid for writing essays and reviews while hoping to be named to a university chair in Peruvian studies. His world changes when the self-styled “proletarian intellectual” attends a concert at the home of a fellow gourmand of music and discovers a brilliant young guitarist whose audience, Toño rhapsodizes, responds with “reverential silence.” (The novel’s title is meaningful.) That the young man is insufferable and soon absents himself does nothing to dissuade Toño from arriving at the eccentric thesis that, in the years following the defeat of the Shining Path, only Peruvian vernacular music could give the nation a sense of unity and direction. He writes a book to that effect, ever dissatisfied with the argument and altering it edition after edition, gaining that university post in the bargain and becoming a well-known figure in a city where he’d previously been nearly anonymous. It doesn’t take long for that world to come crashing down. Along the way, Vargas Llosa takes subtle digs at academia, psychiatry, politics, Peruvian society, the literary world, and the fever dreams that inspire messianic projects that inevitably fail. It’s not the masterpiece that Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The War of the End of the World were, but it has its charms.

A graceful, pensive farewell by a master storyteller.