Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa has been forced to deny that he sold a story to Hola! magazine in Spain, and that he announced a new relationship on Twitter, following a review in the New York Times Book Review on Sunday which he said “contains information … that is both slanderous and perfidious”.
Reviewing Vargas Llosa’s new collection of essays Notes on the Death of Culture, an indictment of the west’s obsession with entertainment, novelist Joshua Cohen put the Peruvian writer in the “Grumpy Old Novelists” category, finding that “Vargas Llosa’s novels have never hesitated to traffic in the same high-low blend he now bemoans”.
Cohen ended his review by pointing out that shortly before Notes on the Death of Culture was published, the novelist “left his wife of 50 years for Isabel Preysler, a Filipino-born Spanish socialite, model and former beauty queen known as the Pearl of Manila, and as the ex-wife of Julio Iglesias”, adding that Vargas Llosa announced the relationship on Twitter, and sold an “exclusive” story and photographs to Hola!
But Vargas Llosa, in a letter to the editor, said the write-up “contains information about me that is both slanderous and perfidious”. “I have never had a Twitter account, and I have never posted and never will post anything on any Twitter account. I have never sold a photo or story to Hola! magazine or any other outlet in connection with any relationship or personal matter,” the author continued. “I am flabbergasted to learn that this kind of gossip can work its way into a respectable publication such as the Book Review.”
The lines have now been removed from the review, with an editor’s note revealing that “the reviewer had based his account of these matters mostly on information from an article about Vargas Llosa in The Daily Mail”, that “neither the reviewer nor editors independently verified those statements”, and that “using such information is at odds with the Times’s journalistic standards”.
Vargas Llosa, whose works include The Feast of the Goat (2000) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) won the Nobel prize for literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
