This fascinating, eccentric book becomes a quirky primer on Peruvian music and culture<\/p>\n
When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa\u2019s native country and, in particular, its music.<\/p>\n
The novel\u2019s quixotic hero is a music journalist called To\u00f1o Azpilcueta. To\u00f1o always hoped to be a professor of Peruvian music, but as the novel opens, he\u2019s earning a meagre living teaching at a girls\u2019 school and writing articles for specialist magazines. Luckily, he\u2019s subsidised by his longsuffering wife, Matilde. To\u00f1o is a recognisable type: the impecunious cultural obsessive. If he were British, he would be fanatical about free jazz, or some obscure Delta bluesman. But this is Peru and To\u00f1o\u2019s particular infatuation is the vals<\/em>, <\/em>a Peruvian musical style that fuses the European waltz with African and indigenous Latin American traditions.<\/p>\n
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