Peruvian author Alfredo Bryce Echenique, "who wrote with an insider's touch about the heedlessness of his country's upper crust and the quiet suffering of the classes underneath," died March 10, the New York Times reported. He was 87. His death was announced by the office of Peru's president, who called him "one of the most brilliant figures in our literature."
Sometimes considered "the other Peruvian," to distinguish him from his friend Mario Vargas Llosa, Bryce Echenique was also grouped with the other Latin American novelists of the literary "boom" of the 1960s and '70s, like Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina. But he "was not so easily categorized," the Times wrote. "An understated chronicler of the elevated milieu from which he came, he eschewed the surreal distortions of Mr. García Márquez's magical realism and the high politics and morality that infused the work of Mr. Vargas Llosa. In Mr. Bryce Echenique's novels, the critique of disparities and inequality is implicit."
"Bryce Echenique's first instinct as a writer is to be witty rather than moralistic," Jonathan Thacker wrote in a 2003 Times Literary Supplement review of El Huerto de Mi Amada (The Garden of My Lover).
His best-known work, A World for Julius (1970), is one of only two of his 12 novels that have been translated into English, in 1992. An evocation of his upper-class childhood in 1940s Lima, the book features Julius, who "judges from an intimate distance the hedonism of his beautiful mother and her vapid social set in Peru's capital city," the Times noted.
Bryce Echenique's father was the director of the Banco Internacional del Peru, and his mother a descendant of a Spanish viceroy and a 19th-century Peruvian president, José Rufino Echenique. Bryce Echenique spent his life shuttling between Europe and Peru, and early in his life decided to "make a deep break with my social class," as he said in 1972.
"His own social class loathed him," said his biographer, Peruvian journalist Daniel Titinger. "He would say, 'The elitists are deeply ignorant.' " Yet that same class informs the dense fabric of A World for Julius, praised by French writer Michel Braudeau in Le Monde as the "magnificent evocation of a casual, extravagant and cruel universe where only golf outings and the next cocktail party count."
In 1993, more than 20 years after the novel's publication in Peru, Robert Houston wrote in the New York Times Book Review that A World for Julius was a "masterpiece of Latin American fiction... like the best of Dickens's novels," and "a great fat book that completely engages a reader with its characters and places."
None of his subsequent novels achieved the success of his first, which won France's best foreign novel prize in 1974 and Peru's 1972 national literature prize. He won Spain's national narrative prize in 1998 for Reo de Nocturnidad (A Night Owl). Other books include Tarzan's Tonsillitis (1998), La Vida Exagerada de Martin Romaña (1981), and Huerto Cerrado (Enclosed Garden) in 1968.
Titinger said that in his fiction, Bryce Echenique elaborated from the "quotidian," from themes of "friendship, love, tenderness," and wrote from the "point of view of failure and the loser." Bryce Echenique told Le Monde in 1999: "I always start from reality, but from an angle to which nobody else paid the slightest attention. And from there, I invented, and so people in my set called me a liar."