Gabriel Garcia MarquezOne of my gateways into literature was the new wave of fiction from Latin-America which gained prominence in the 1960s. However, I have only read one book each (or as I am about to describe, one and a half) of its two main figureheads and nobel laureates: Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Back when Llosa was awarded that accolade I remember reading an article by William Boyd that was inculcated into my system: he described Vargas Llosa as a 'fox' and Marquez as a 'Hedgehog.'
From the two books I've read by each writer - The Feast of the Goat, a comparatively lesser work under Vargas Llosa's belt and One Hundred Years of Solitude, a unanimously acclaimed novel by Marquez - I find this to be an absolutely accurate statement.
What's striking about the two books is the style. Vargas Llosa is very varied - he switches tenses, locations and places in time within the space of a few pages. I have tried read Hundred Years of Solitude twice and I literally lose the will to live by page 150. I start of thinking "Yeah, that's cute," but as I progress through the narrative I am become exausted by the same stlye and tone being reiterated time and time again...
But it was revolutionary, you may say? I don't think so. Marquez was only popularising the concepts and ideas of writers who were far more complex and ingenious - Juan Rulfo, Juan Carlos Onetti and the stories of Borges... He simplified the more complex conceptions of these writers and spread a plague in which writers from across the world derived their ideas from Marquez and produced a magic realism that was even more kitsch than his own...
Reading about the bibilography of these writers to me is also indicative of the range of each. Vargas Llosa covers continents around the world, a wide variety of themes, a plethora of genres... Whilst Marquez, from what I can gather, simply writes the same book time and time again. If you look at it from this perspective, you can see that Llosa's prize was far more deserved. Marquez flippantly claimed that by awading him they were awarding the whole of South America - which was actually true... Vargas Llosa's award is a recognition of a lifetime of literary endeavour.
The Nobel commitee was criticised by some naive people for awarding the prize for Llosa's politics. I actually find it refreshing that the Nobel Prize was given out to someone from the political right; the politics of the Nobel comitee have always been incredibly biased and unfair. Borges, though it was a terrible move, gave support to Pinochet's government and was thus barred from ever winning the prize. Why should politics be brought to the equation when this is supposed to be a literary award?
Besides, the politics of Vargas Llosa are far more respectable than Marquez's. He is a centrist who leans to the right and an advocate for freedom and democracy against authoritarian dictatorships. Marquez, on the other hand, has been a vocal supporter of Fidel Castro since the inception of the Cuban regime... His politics are very rarely questioned, but they are as ineptly conceived and monotonous as his own writings...
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