Alfredo Bryce
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Alfredo Bryce Echenique (born February 19, 1939) is a Peruvian writer born in Lima. He has written several books and short stories.
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[edit] Early days
Son of a well-off, English-Peruvian family. Upon the wish of his family Bryce Echenique studied law in the National University of San Marcos until 1964. His literary interest nevertheless prevailed and so, shortly afterwards, he completed a parallel study course in literature with a thesis on Ernest Hemingway.
[edit] Rise in literary career
A year later he received a grant from the French government which, like many other Latin American authors of the boom period, led him to Paris. At the Sorbonne he studied classic and modern French literature and then taught at various French schools and universities.
After the story volume Huerto cerrado came out in 1968, his first novel Un mundo para Julius became a big success and counts today as one of the classics of Latin American literature. The novel, which has since been translated into ten languages, tells the story of a young boy who grows up as the youngest of four children of a rich, Peruvian upper class family. Although Julius actually belongs to the ruling classes he feels a stronger bond with the servants which surround him and this brings him into conflict with his family. With biting irony the author exposes, through the eyes of a child, the great social differences in Peruvian society.
[edit] Recent successes
Un mundo para Julius marks for Bryce Echenique the start of an extremely productive literary career, in which he has until today written nearly twenty novels and story volumes.
I am an author of the second half of the 20th century. Despite this declaration and his spatial and temporal closeness to other Latin American authors of the boom generation, Bryce Echenique keeps a conscious distance to his colleagues who he sometimes refers to as nouveau riche. That his style, as one critic once said, corresponds more to an ironic than a magic realism, is shown by the author also in one his last novel La amigdalitis de Tarzán from 1999. Largely in the form of letters, the novel tells the story of the hindered romantic relationship between a poor Peruvian troubadour and the daughter of an influential Salvadorian family.
Similar to his heroes, Alfredo Bryce Echenique also lived for decades far away from his home city of Lima to which he only returned to in 1999.
[edit] Bibliography
- Huerto Cerrado
- Un mundo para Julius (A world for Julius)
- Tantas veces Pedro (So many times Pedro)
- La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña
- El hombre que hablaba de Octavia Cádiz.
- No me esperen en Abril (Don't wait for me in April)
- Permiso para vivir (Antimemorias)
- Reo de Nocturnidad
- La Amigdalitis de Tarzán (Tarzan's Amigdalitis)
- Permiso para Sentir (Antimemorias II)
- Guía triste de París (Sad guide about Paris)
- La felicidad Ja Ja (The happiness, ha ha)
- El Huerto de mi Amada
