Posted on Sunday, 11.08.09

ASKING AUTHORS

Q & A | Jaime Bayly: A conservative antibourgeois

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ABOUT THE FAIR

What: Miami Book Fair International 2009

When: Nov. 8-15; Street Fair: Nov. 13-15

Where: Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus: 300 N.E. Second Avenue, Miami

Cost: Nov. 13: free. Nov. 14-15: $8; people 62 and older: $5; ages 18 and under, free.

Timetables: Hard copies of a schedule of events will be distributed at the fair entrance.

More information: MiamiHerald.com; www.miamibookfair.com; 305-237-3258; 305-237-3314.

Special to El Nuevo Herald

Olga Connor, who writes often for El Nuevo Herald about Cuban culture, interviewed Jaime Bayly, the well-known Peruvian writer and journalist whose latest book is ``El Cojo y el Loco'' (``The Mad and the Cripple'') (Alfaguara, $16.99):

With a reputation as an enfant terrible of television, Jaime Bayly has the luxury of writing any way he wants, about whatever he wants and however he wants, without apparent limitations or reservations.

His newspaper columns earn him the disgust of many, who nevertheless read them. He knows how to entertain, is a political conservative (but simultaneously a social radical) who admits to being bisexual for a long time, back to the days when it wasn't fashionable, in the bosom of a very conservative society in Lima, Peru.

And he dares to be an out-and-out antibourgeois, even though he's a member of the upper class.

One of Bayly's literary heroes portrays the model he likes to follow, the rebel with cause, Henry Charles Bukowski.

``The old Los Angeles postman who threw the letters into the garbage, refused to deliver them and went to drink in a bar and get into a fist fight with some barfly will always be one of my great literary heroes,'' Bayly says, ``precisely because he became a writer despite everything and against everyone, particularly against his father, who was his main enemy.''

Nobody who has followed Bayly's career can forget the series of interviews from Lima with his mother, whom he obviously adores, even though she is as religious as he is skeptic. Or his attacks on his Mega TV program on Hugo Chávez and the brothers Castro, attacks that earned him profuse plaudits from the Cuban and Venezuelan exiles living in Miami.

But it is in his Spanish-language novels, from his first book, Don't tell anyone (1994) to those that followed -- It was yesterday and I don't remember (1995), The night is virgin (1997), I love my mommy (1998), The friends I lost (2000), Suddenly, an angel (2005), and The sentimental swine (2008) -- that Bayly demonstrates his extraordinary talent for the art of story-telling.

His latest novel, The mad and the cripple (Alfaguara), which he will introduce Saturday 14 at 6 p.m. at the Miami International Book Fair, is told in language that's at times coarse, scatological and pornographic, but its action is so dizzying that it carries the reader on a roller-coaster to the end.

The language is essential. It gives the mental environment in which the characters move, in an erotic and violent (though sometimes pious) style that would be the ideal of structuralist criticism. The author disagrees.

``A great Peruvian writer, Ribeyro [Julio Ramón Ribeyro Zúñiga] wrote in his diaries that the great works of the [literary] boom attributed excessive importance to the technique,'' Bayly asserts.

``I believe that in Latin American literature there is a tendency to overrate the narrative technique.

``If one re-reads [Gabriel García Márquez's] La Hojarasca -- pure Faulkner -- or [Mario Vargas Llosa's] The Green House -- pure Faulkner -- one would have to say that the great Ribeyro was right.

``I have always tried to let the style imbue the characters with life and enrich the novel, without eclipsing it at the end.'' Then, he clinches that statement with a conclusion that seems ironic.

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