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From Bolaño's library · writer
Mario Vargas Llosa
Peru
- Where in Bolaño
- Mentioned in The Savage Detectives (reader-reported; I have not located the passage — most likely in the Boom chatter of a Part II testimony); also in interviews (notably the 2003 Playboy México interview) and glancingly in Between Parentheses
- Why read them
- Asked what the Boom giants' names meant to him, Bolaño answered with a joke about men delighted to have known presidents and archbishops — Vargas Llosa being the more polished case. The mockery aimed at the institution, not the sentences: elsewhere he conceded the craft. Vargas Llosa returned the ambivalence, praising The Savage Detectives's opening hundred pages while calling the rest a Borgesian game.
