A Fish in the Water by Mario Vargas Llosa — Read

One day in September or October 1957, Luis Loayza brought me a piece of unbelievable news: a short story contest, organized by a French magazine, the prize for which was-a two-week trip to Paris!

La Revue Francaise, a deluxe publication devoted to art and edited by Monsieur Prouverelle, was bringing out a series of issues, each of which was a monograph on a different country. The short story contest, with its coveted prize, was a feature of that series of monographs. An opportunity like that catapulted me to my typewriter, as was the case with every living Peruvian who knew how to write, and that was how I came to pen "El desafío" ("The Challenge"), a story about an old man who sees his son die in a knife duel, in the dry riverbed of the Piura, that is included in my first book, Los jefes, a collection of short stories published in 1959. (In English, the book's title is The Cubs and Other Stories.) I entered the short story in the contest, the winner of which was to be decided by a jury headed by Jorge Basadre and on which there were critics and writers-Héctor Velarde, Luis Jaime Cisneros, André Coyné, and Sebastián Salazar Bondy-and tried to think of something else, so that the disappointment wouldn't be as great if anyone else turned out to be the winner. Some weeks later, one afternoon when I was beginning to prepare the 6 p.m. news bulletin, Luis Loayza appeared in the doorway of my shack at Radio Panamericana, elated: "You're going to France! " He was as overjoyed as though he'd won the prize himself.