MIAMI.- “The only advice I convey to young people who are starting out as writers in the daily press: tell and defend their truth, whether it coincides or disagrees with what the newspaper defends editorially,” said the writer Mario Vargas Llosa in his last column in The Passpublished today, December 17.
With this summary, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature said goodbye to his traditional publication in the Spanish media that saw the light of day on May 4, 1976. Date in which Spain lived through the so-called Transition period, which culminated with the return of democracy.
As expected, Varga Llosa – an assiduous defender of the aforementioned form of government – used this historical fact to make his readers reflect.
“I don’t know if it was Juan Luis Cebrin, its first director, or Jesús de Polanco, the main shareholder of El País, who set a line from the beginning, but what is clear is that whoever did it had a very modern idea of the written press. , because the appearance of The Pass“, in the middle of the Transition, was one of the best that Spain had to offer in the new regime,” said the 87-year-old intellectual in the column entitled Touchstone.
Naked eye, Touchstone It can be read as the last publication that the Peruvian makes in the Spanish media. However, this column means much more: it brings the end of 33 years of journalistic career that Vargas Llosa had with The Passmeans saying goodbye to an average of 25 articles per year written by the also winner of the 1993 Planeta Prize, which appeared biweekly.
But the only son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta does not completely say goodbye to letters. The writer is working on an essay about the Frenchman Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, with whom he was influenced during his youth.
