More than a thousand people filled the main hall of the Buenos Aires Book Fair on Monday, May 9, to listen to Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa talk about literature and politics. 

"I have not been able to read Proust, I have finished his books with great difficulty," Vargas Llosa admitted. "I think he is a frivolous, superficial writer, I don't understand the admiration the French have for him," was one of his controversial statements at the FIL Buenos Aires fair, as quoted by the online platform Página 12.

As for politics, he said he had little confidence in the Latin American left, "and I say this because of my country. It is a fanatical, dogmatic left, closed to new ideas, with a distorted vision of reality," said Vargas Llosa, who at one point specified that he was Marxist only one year of his life, when he was in college and was a Communist Party militant.

"Mr. Putin attacks a small country and the left does not condemn. The Latin American left responds automatically to the slogans and this way there is no possibility of change," he said. "Latin America is getting much worse; the situation could not be more tragic. It is very difficult to be optimistic in the face of a Latin America that is paralyzed by new dictatorships or about to sink again into a period of violence, which is what could happen in Central America, Colombia or Brazil."

 "Latin America is sinking little by little partly because of the left's responsibility for the past, a past that is sinister and unjust. Injustice is present in most Latin American countries; we face a kind of systematic deafness. It is not pessimism, but a call to conscience to modernize once and for all," he continued.

The novelist, who also took advantage of his appearance at FIL Buenos Aires to promote his latest book, La mirada quieta, a portrait of the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, also expressed his doubts about the eventual promotion of literature by the Ibero-American states.

In his opinion, the different governments are "increasingly aware" of the literary "wealth" that exists in both Spain and Latin America. 

"It will depend entirely on us to demand that our governments tolerate this insolent, uncomfortable and difficult literature," he said, according to Infobae.