Alfredo Bryce Echenique, a Peruvian novelist 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 on March 10 at his home in Lima. He was 87.
His death was announced by the office of Peru’s president, which called him “one of the most brilliant figures in our literature.”
Mr. Bryce Echenique was sometimes considered “the other Peruvian,” to distinguish him from his friend the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. And he was occasionally lumped in with the other Latin American novelists of the literary “boom” of the 1960s and ’70s, like Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortazar of Argentina.
But Mr. Bryce Echenique was not so easily categorized. 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, a professor of Spanish studies at the University of Oxford, wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in 2003, reviewing the author’s “El Huerto de Mi Amada” (“The Garden of My Lover”).
His best-known work, “A World for Julius” (1970) — one of only two of his 12 novels that have been translated into English, in 1992 — is a tender, ironic evocation of an upper-class childhood in 1940s Lima: his own.
Julius, the central figure, judges from an intimate distance the hedonism of his beautiful mother and her vapid social set in Peru’s capital city. He is a small boy as the novel begins.
Mr. Bryce Echenique knew the milieu well. His father was the director of the Banco Internacional del Peru, one of the country’s most important financial institutions. His mother was a descendant of a Spanish viceroy and a 19th-century Peruvian president, José Rufino Echenique — “the worst” of Peru’s presidents, Mr. Bryce Echenique said in an interview in 1991.
Largely free of material concerns, Mr. Bryce Echenique spent his life shuttling between Europe and Peru. Early on, he decided to “make a deep break with my social class,” he said in 1972.
The feeling seemed to be mutual. “His own social class loathed him,” his biographer, the Peruvian journalist Daniel Titinger, said in an interview. “He would say, ‘The elitists are deeply ignorant.’”
Yet that same class informs the dense fabric of “A World for Julius,” hailed by the 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.”
It is also a world of butlers, nannies and servants, and it is this underclass that moves and fascinates the boy. To his mother’s distress, Julius identifies more with them than with her.
Recounting the death of Bertha, the nanny of Julius’s sister, Mr. Bryce Echenique suggested the dehumanized, accessory role of the servant to the wealthy. “She died on a hot summer afternoon,” the omniscient narrator says, adding that “the swimming pool had just been drained.” He says of Bertha, “Before succumbing, she was careful to put the cologne bottle down securely so it wouldn’t fall and break; she put it on the ground because it was closer to her.”
In The New York Times Book Review in 1993, Robert Houston, a novelist who lived and taught in Lima, called the book, more than 20 years after its publication in Peru, a “masterpiece of Latin American fiction.” It is “like the best of Dickens’s novels,” he wrote, and “a great fat book that completely engages a reader with its characters and places.”
By the time “Julius” was published, Mr. Bryce Echenique was nearing a long, self-imposed exile in France and Spain, some of it spent as a lecturer at the Sorbonne. Numerous novels followed. In France, he remained deeply critical of Peru’s politics, telling Le Monde after a brief return to his native country in 1999 that terrorism by the leftist Shining Path guerrillas and successive dictatorships had left “misery everywhere” and “no more middle class.”
None of his subsequent novels achieved quite the renown of “A World for Julius,” which won France’s best foreign novel prize in 1974. It received Peru’s national literature prize in 1972. Among other awards, Mr. Bryce Echenique received Spain’s national narrative prize in 1998 for “Reo de Nocturnidad” (“A Night Owl”).
His epistolary novel, “Tarzan’s Tonsillitis” (1998), told partly through love letters exchanged between male and female protagonists, received mixed reviews. Suzanne Ruta wrote in The Times Book Review that “her grateful, desperate and often moving letters alternate with his less absorbing commentaries and updates.” It was Mr. Bryce Echenique’s only other book translated into English.
One of his most admired books in the Spanish-speaking world, “La Vida Exagerada de Martin Romaña” (1981), tells the story of a leftist Peruvian revolutionary in 1960s Paris who is given an unlikely commission to write a book about Peruvian fishing unions. It was praised by the author and translator Adam Feinstein in The Times Literary Supplement for its “tender intelligence, energy and humor.”
Mr. Titinger, his biographer, said that in his fiction, Mr. Bryce Echenique elaborated from the “quotidian,” from themes of “friendship, love, tenderness,” and wrote from the “point of view of failure and the loser.”
Mr. Bryce Echenique himself 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.”
Alfredo Marcelo Bryce Echenique was born in Lima on Feb. 19, 1939, the youngest of five children of Francisco Bryce Arróspide and Elena Echenique Basombrio.
He attended schools in Lima, including San Pablo, a British-run boarding school, before entering the National University of San Marcos in 1957. He graduated in 1963 with degrees in law, at the insistence of his father, and literature, with a thesis on Ernest Hemingway.
Mr. Bryce Echenique left Peru the next year by boat, settled in the Latin Quarter of Paris and began writing a doctoral dissertation on Henry de Montherlant, a contemporary French novelist and playwright. (He did not received his doctorate from San Marcos until 1977.) He began writing fiction in 1965 and published a book of short stories in Peru in 1968, “Huerto Cerrado” (“Enclosed Garden”).
In later years, he was dogged by charges of plagiarism, for having passed off others’ newspaper columns as his own work in the Spanish and Peruvian media. In 2009, a Peruvian administrative court fined him about 42,000 euros for having plagiarized 15 articles by 16 different writers, according to the Spanish newspaper El País.
“The accusations were very serious,” Mr. Titinger said. “He never admitted them in public. Deep down he was very remorseful.” Mr. Titinger attributed the lapses to “psychiatric issues,” noting that Mr. Bryce Echenique was prone to depression.
His marriages to Maggie Revilla, Pilar de Vega Martínez and Ana Chávez Montoya ended in divorce. He is survived by a sister, Elena Bryce de Bértoli.
Mr. Bryce Echenique told interviewers he had been telling stories all his life.
“At school, my classmates would wait for me to tell them a story,” he recalled to Agence France-Presse in 2009. “I told it with a lot of humor and irony. And I became famous, at school.”
Elda Cantú contributed reporting.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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