"The old man has always been a Romantic. It is easy to picture him there in the military boarding school in Lima, 1950. He describes it to us in four words; damp, gray, boring, unhappy. That was Mario Vargas Llosa 60 years before he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
In the face of the doldrums, Vargas Llosa turned to Victor Hugo. Who else is a sensitive young lad living in Peru going to turn to? I say this jokingly, but also, not. In a curious and enjoyable little book Vargas Llosa wrote about Hugo's Les Misérables (The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and “Les Misérables”), he describes being carried away by Hugo's world of 'extreme misfortune, love, courage, happiness, and vile deeds.'
But more than that, Vargas Llosa speaks about being caught in the horns of a dilemma. Vargas Llosa found solace in the amazing fictional worlds created by Victor Hugo. Escaping into the world of Jean Valjean gave Vargas Llosa the fortitude he needed to face the real world. But it also made the real world seem pale in comparison. Real reality couldn't live up to the dreams of Victor Hugo. Hugo was, thus, helping Mario Vargas Llosa with the problems of the real world and taking away his faith in reality at the same time."
Llosa's debt to Hugo--how interesting. And it is something Llosa himself has written on... I'll have to check this out.
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