Voz Media attended the presentation of Los Genios this Tuesday, the new novel written by TV host and journalist Jaime Bayly, which took place at the Wellington Hotel in Madrid.
In the words of the writer himself, the story "is a work of fiction that intermingles real historical facts with other imagined ones." The story tries to explain the reasons for the fight between Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Marquéz. According to Bayly, it is written "out of admiration for both geniuses who have had so much to do with my literary career":
They never spoke to each other again, they never saw each other again, they were never friends again (...) The novel wonders why Mario Vargas Llosa gave Gabriel García Márquez that punch. Not only does it recreate the glorious years of the early Latin American boom in which the geniuses were great friends, but it also penetrates into the intimacy and explores the circumstances that led Vargas Llosa to break that friendship so violently.
Voz Media attends the presentation of 'Los Genios'
Madrid was one of the cities chosen for the presentation of Bayly's new novel, which he says is written in a very different way from his other successes.
The journalist confessed to Voz Media that he was "scared" to launch his new novel and explained that the main difference between this story and others he has written is that this one is told "in the third person," and in a much more "historical" way. He also commented that this is the first of his novels in which he does not appear in any of the characters.
(Audio in spanish)
The story is told by Bayly through the eyes and memories of close friends of both "geniuses." It has taken him 25 years to collect testimonies, "to collate contradictory versions, to search for the historical truth. He has dedicated over half of his life to this novel":
Bayly knew Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, his writer friends, for years he has interviewed them, talked to them, tried to solve the puzzle that obsessed him: why they fought, why Mario punched Gabo, why they were enemies for the rest of their lives.
