When Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa joined Asharq Al-Awsat, he naturally carried with him his cultural wealth, his beautiful style, his quarrels, and his ridicule of his senior companions, those who held the Nobel Prize in Literature and those who were deprived of it. When talking about Llosa’s character, one immediately remembers his story with the other Latin Nobleman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, when they quarreled over the love of a woman. Llosa had no choice but to raise his fist and use it to punch his rival and rival.
Llosa also fights with his fist. With this fist, on Wednesday (December 13), he attacked the French writer André Malraux, who became the first Minister of Culture in the history of France during the reign of Charles de Gaulle. I believe that de Gaulle deliberately took this historic step in order to gain the position of a man who could not complete his secondary studies.
Llosa does not refer to this point in his attack on Malraux. But he repeats, or adopts, without discussion, the charges brought against the great French writer and author of the novel “The Condition of Man” during his lifetime. Among them is that Malraux fabricated many meetings, interviews and friendships, including what he wrote – after their deaths – about his conversations with Nehru, Mao Zedong, General Giap and others. Not to mention his famous conversations with de Gaulle himself, which were published in a very beautiful little book, entitled “When We Uproot the Oaks.” It was translated into Arabic at the time by Dr. Sami Al-Jundi.
Llosa repeats the accusations made by Ernest Hemingway against Malraux: an imaginative, courageous, pretentious adventurer, and a fighter who knows nothing about war.
Llosa adds something that was not known before, which is that the French government assigned Malraux to organize the air force in Indochina (later Vietnam) even though he knew nothing about flying aircraft.
The strange thing is that the most famous picture of Malraux in our memory was the man in a leather aviator jacket and aviator glasses, but how can we argue with Señor Llosa at this stage of his life now? In his eighties, he lives another love story, which also raises questions about the rates of honesty and accuracy.
No matter how he writes, Señor Llosa is sociable and entertaining, and his words exude the steam of Peruvian coffee. When he talks about André Malraux’s “vanity,” he reminds us that he (he) is not known for his humility at all. I think, and I think it is a bit of a sin, that our charming writer did not find a topic for his corner this week, so he resorted to old notebooks, as all professionals do in times of drought. The sweetest poetry is the most untruthful, and may God forgive its writer, who is still anonymous.
