4 - Prelude: Los jefes (1959)

Summary

The collection of short stories, published in 1959 under the title Los jefes [The Leaders], was Mario Vargas Llosa's first literary publication in book form. English versions of Los jefes are usually published in conjunction with his only other piece of short narrative, Los cachorros [The Cubs] (1967), under the title The Cubs and Other Stories But while he regards Los cachorros as a mature piece of writing, Vargas Llosa characterizes the stories that make up Los jefes as ‘youthful transgressions’ inspired by Hemingway's ‘stylistic abstinence and objectivity’, a ‘handful of survivors out of the many I wrote and tore up between 1953 and 1957, while I was still a student in Lima’. Despite the author's retrospective self-critical attitude to those ‘adolescent and machista stories’ (‘Author's Preface’, p. xv) the book won a Spanish literary prize in 1959, the Premio Leopoldo Alas. Since he was the first of the future Boom authors to publish his work in Spain, this was an important step towards the success of Latin American fiction in Europe. But already in 1957 one of the stories, ‘El desafio’, had won first prize in a competition for Peruvian short fiction organized by the French art and travel magazine La Revue Française.