Bryce Echenique, Alfredo 1939–

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Bryce Echenique, Alfredo 1939–

PERSONAL: Born February 19, 1939, in Lima, Peru; son of Francisco (a banker) and Elena Bryce Echenique. Education: Nacional University Mayor of San Marcos, Lima, law degree, 1964, Ph.D., 1977; attended school in Paris, France.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Plaza y Janes, Virgen de Guadelup 12-33, 08950 Esplugas de Llubregat, Barcelona, Spain.

CAREER: Writer and educator. University of Nanterre, Paris, France, reader of Spanish, 1968–73; Sorbonne, Paris, France, faculty member, 1971–74; University of Vincennes, Paris, France, assistant of literature and Latinoamerican civilization, 1973–80; Paul Valery (Montpellier) University, France, assistant of Latinoamerican literature and civilization, 1980–82; University of Austin, Texas, visiting professor, 1987; University of Puerto Rico, visiting professor, 1991, 1997; Yale University, New Haven, CT, visiting professor, 1995.

AWARDS, HONORS: "Ricardo Palma" in Peru, 1972; Passión, booksellers of France, 1984, for best novel of the year; Sir of the Arts, 1986; Letters of France, 1986; Official of the Arts and the Letters, France, 1995; Commendador de la Orden de Isabel la Católica, 1993; Dag Hammarskjold Peace Prize, 1997; Premio de Novella prize, Spain, 2002, for Elhuerto de mi amada.

WRITINGS:

Huerto cerrado (title means "Closed Garden"), Casa de las Americas (Havana, Cuba), 1968.

Un mundo para Julius, Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1970, translation by Dick Gerdes published as A World for Julius, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1992.

Muerte de Sevilla en Madrid; Antes de la cita con los Linares (novel; title partially means "Death of Sevilla in Madrid"), Mosca Azul (Lima, Peru), 1972.

La felicidad, ja, ja (title means ("Happiness, Ha, Ha"), Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1974.

La Pasión segun San Pedro Balbuena que fue tantas veces Pedro y que nunca pudo negar a nadie, Libre-1 (Lima, Peru), 1977.

Avuelo de buen cubero y otras cronicas (nonfiction; title means "Wayward Journeys and Other Chronicles"), Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1977.

Todos los cuentos (title means "Short Stories"), Mosca Azul (Lima, Peru), 1979.

Cuentos completos (short stories), Alianza (Madrid, Spain), 1981, revised, Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1995.

La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, Argos Vergara (Barcelona, Spain), 1981, reprinted, Cátedra (Madrid, Spain), 2000.

El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cadíz, Plaza y Janes (Barcelona, Spain), 1985, reprinted, Cátedra (Madrid, Spain), 2003.

Magdalena peruana y otros cuentos (short stories), Plaza y Janes (Barcelona, Spain), 1986.

Goig, Debate (Madrid, Spain), 1987.

Tantas veces pedro, Plaza y Janes (Barcelona, Spain), 1987.

La última mudanza de Felipe Carrilo, Plaza y Janes (Barcelona, Spain), 1988.

Crónicas personales, Editorial Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1988.

Dos señoras conversan; Un sapo el desierto; Los grandes hombres son asi, y tambien asa, Plaza y Janes (Barcelona, Spain), 1990.

Permiso para vivir: antimemorias (memoir), Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1993.

Antología personal, Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (San Juan, Puerto Rico), 1995.

No me esperen en abril (novel), Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1995.

Para que duela menos, Espasa Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 1995.

A trancas y barrancas, Espasa (Madrid, Spain), 1996.

15 cuentos de amor y humor, PEISA (Lima, Peru), 1996.

La Amigdalitis de Tarzán (novel), Alfaguara (Lima, Peru), 1998, translation by Alfred MacAdam published as Tarzan's Tonsillitis, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Guia triste de Paris (short stories), PEISA (Lima, Peru), 1999.

Reo de nocturnidad (novel; title means "Nocturnal Prisoner"), Editorial Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1997.

Charla magistral, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (Lima, Peru), 1998.

Sirenas, Monstruos y Leyendas: Bestiario Maritimo, Sociedad Estatal Lisboa '98 (Segovia, Spain), 1998.

La historia personal de mis libros, Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Peru (Lima, Peru), 2000.

Cronicas Perdidas, PEISA (Lima, Peru), 2001.

(With others) Hemingway desde Espana, Visor Libros (Madrid, Spain), 2001.

El Huerto de Mi Amada (title means "My Lover's Orchard"), Planeta (Barcelona, Spain), 2002.

Doce cartas a dos amigos (correspondence; title means "Twelve Carts and Two Friends"), PEISA (Lima, Peru), 2003.

Entrevistas escogidas, prologue and notes by Jorge Coaguila, Fondo Editorial Cultura Peruana (Lima, Peru), 2004.

Permiso para sentir, PEISA (Lima, Peru), 2005.

Contributor of short stories to anthologies, including Cuentistas hispanoamericanos en la Sorbona, compiled by Olver Gilberto de León, Ediciones de la Plaza, 1984; author of prologue to Silvio en el rosedal, by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Tusquets (Barcelona, Spain), 1989.

Works have been published in French and English.

SIDELIGHTS: Although Alfredo Bryce Echenique has been widely read in Europe and Latin America and is considered a leading novelist of Peru, he is less well known in the United States. In addition to novels, Bryce Echenique has authored several collections of short stories, novellas, and several collected works of journalism. Bryce Echenique's writing is characterized by its readable tone and its humor. He has created characters who are often underdogs and has written about the experience of exile from a Latin American perspective.

The author was exposed to writing and reading at an early age, as his mother was an admirer of French literature. Though Bryce Echenique wanted to pursue a literature degree in college, he made law school a priority at the wish of his father. Nonetheless, he also earned a literature degree in 1964, and his thesis concerned Ernest Hemingway. Bryce Echenique won a scholarship to study in Paris and happened to arrive there as a Latin American literary movement was growing in the city. Paris was later to influence his writing. He published his first book in 1965—a collection of short stories titled Huerto cerrado. The collection later won an award and remained significant because it introduces a number of themes that Bryce Echenique continued to write about in later works. Huerto cerrado is also influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whom Bryce Echenique greatly admires.

One of the stories in Huerto cerrado, "With Jimmy, in Paracas," is considered significant by the author because it employs a narrative style that he has since used repeatedly. According to a profile of Bryce Echenique in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, this style is characterized by a "confessional tone," usually narrated by "protagonists who are losers and emotionally incapable of asserting themselves in the world." The characters are usually sentimental and also quite aware of their shortcomings.

Bryce Echenique later uses this narrative device in his 1970 novel A World for Julius, which put the author in the forefront of Latin American writers. A World for Julius explores the chasm between rich and poor in Peru. According to a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, A World for Julius effectively uses language by subtly shifting between a variety of narrative viewpoints. Bryce Echenique continued to write about the Peruvian upper class in La felicidad, ja, ja, published in 1974. In this work, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, Bryce Echenique "insists that the happiness of the wealthy is frivolous and illusory," as well as morally bankrupt.

Muerte de Sevilla en Madrid; Antes de la cita con los Linares, which appeared in 1972, again portrays an underdog protagonist—a bureaucrat with little self-confidence or zest for life. When the character unexpectedly wins a trip to Spain as part of a promotion, the experience is too much for him and he commits suicide. The story is narrated with humor but the tone turns gradually dark. Bryce Echenique takes an outsider's look at United States locations in the 1977 work Avuelo de buen cubero y otras Cronicas. Focusing mainly on the South, the author attempts to dispel some of the myths of North America that have been promulgated by American cinema. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, the influence of William Faulkner in Journeys is clear, particularly Bryce Echenique's depiction of more "marginal" American characters in places like New Orleans or Memphis.

Bryce Echenique has produced a number of other works, many of which were influenced by his life as an outsider in Europe. He also captures a sense of his homeland and is a noted chronicler of the complex and contradictory society of Peru. Many of Bryce Echenique's characters suffer inwardly but are also searching for meaning in themselves and in the world around them.

In his memoir, Permiso para vivir: antimemorias, which was published shortly after the English version of A World for Julius, the author recalls his life in two distinct parts. The first part focuses on his days as a youth in Peru and then as a struggling writer in Paris. The second section recounts a trip he took to Cuba and "his surreal encounters with the bureaucracy bordering on the farcical," as noted by Ismael P. Marquez in World Literature Today. Marquez went on to call the memoir "a splendid, heartwarming reading experience, not just because the innate oral quality of Bryce Echenique's rich prose creates the vivid illusion that we have been his friends for years, but because every page is a passionate reaffirmation of his conviction" concerning what he believes is most important in life.

Cuentos completos is a collection of all the author's short stories published in volumes previous to 1996 and four stories never before published in a collection. Writing in World Literature Today, Cesar Ferreira noted that "the current edition of his thirty-seven short stories hold important clues to exploring his unique fictional universe, while also underscoring his many virtues as an author of short fiction." In another collection of short stories published in 1999 and titled Guia triste de Paris, the author presents fourteen tales focusing on "the misadventures of Latin Americans in the French capital during the 1960s and 1970s," according to World Literature Today contributor Ferreira. The reviewer went on to note: "As in many of Bryce's works, Peruvian characters see love escape them in these stories, only to find solitude and death as their inevitable destiny."

Bryce Echenique's novel No me esperen en abril focuses on Manongo Sterne, a Peruvian who falls in love with Teresa Mancini while still a teenager. The upper-class Manongo goes on to college where he receives a British-type education that ignores the class struggles of his country. As Manongo grows older, he looks back on his lost love that he can never regain and his days in college where he made his only true friends. Once again writing in World Literature Today, Ferreira commented that "the author's torrential oral prose incorporates an ample variety of tones into its long-winded narration, underscoring humor and irony as powerful tools to explain an unjust social order."

El Huerto de Mi Amada, which means "My Lover's Orchard," is a novel focusing on a love affair between a teenager named Carlitos and Natalia, who is wealthy and twice his age. "Despite its lack of apparent gravity, this book exudes so much fun, tenderness, and compassion that readers might even miss Bryce Echenique's signature, sharp social critique," wrote Gustavo Pesoa in Críicas. In a translation of La Amigdalitis de Tarzán titled Tarzan's Tonsillitis, Bryce Echenique presents the worlds of Paris and South America through the eyes of Juan Manual Carpio, a Peruvian singer and songwriter, and through the love letters between him and his Salvadorian lover, Fernanda Maria de la Trinidad del Monte Montes, whom he met in Paris. "The clarity, emotion, and candor of Fernanda's words puncture the narration's verbal acrobatics," wrote Gregory Howard in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. "The two voices play off of each other, often contrasting, but also, significantly harmonizing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, Permiso para vivir: antimemorias, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1993.

Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Volume 3: African, Caribbean, and Latin-American Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 145: Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, Second Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Críticas, January-February, 2003, Gustavo Pesoa, review of El huerto de mi amada, pp. 32-33.

Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2001, Nick Owchar, review of Tarzan's Tonsillitis, p. E10.

Nation, February 22, 1993, Ilan Stavans, review of A World for Julius, p. 244.

New York Times, February 17, 2002, Suzanne Ruta, review of Tarzan's Tonsillitis, p. 14.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 2002, Gregory Howard, review of Tarzan's Tonsillitis, p. 120.

World Literature Today, spring, 1994, Ismael P. Marquez, review of Permiso para vivir: antimemorias, p. 352, fall, 1996, Cesar Ferreira, review of Cuentos completes, p. 920; winter, 1997, Cesar Ferreira, review of No me esperen en abril, p. 117; summer, 2000, Cesar Ferreira, review of Guia triste de Paris, p. 675.