When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.
The novel’s quixotic hero is a music journalist called Toño Azpilcueta. Toño always hoped to be a professor of Peruvian music, but as the novel opens, he’s earning a meagre living teaching at a girls’ school and writing articles for specialist magazines. Luckily, he’s subsidised by his longsuffering wife, Matilde. Toño is a recognisable type: the impecunious cultural obsessive. If he were British, he would be fanatical about free jazz, or some obscure Delta bluesman. But this is Peru and Toño’s particular infatuation is the vals, a Peruvian musical style that fuses the European waltz with African and indigenous Latin American traditions.
