Julio Ramón Ribeyro

Biography

The story “The Grey Life” ends with the words about a life “useless, rounded, implacably useless”. It was Ribeyro’s first publication, in the Lima magazine Correo Bolivariano (in 1948 by one account, in 1949 or 1950 by others). The author was about nineteen, and he left the story out of his books.

He was born on 31 August 1929 in Lima, in the Santa Beatriz district, the eldest of four children. The family was middle class but had belonged to the upper tier in earlier generations: his ancestors included government ministers and rectors of the University of San Marcos. His childhood was spent in Santa Beatriz, and then the family moved to Miraflores, to the Santa Cruz neighbourhood. He went to school at the Champagnat School. The death of his father worsened the family’s already modest circumstances. From 1946 to 1952 Ribeyro studied arts and law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. There he became close to Pablo Macera, Alberto Escobar and Luis Felipe Angell, and wrote for the university magazine Letras Peruanas. In 1952 he won a journalism fellowship from the Institute of Hispanic Culture and left for Spain: he arrived in Barcelona in November, then spent a year studying at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1953 he moved to Paris to write a thesis on French literature at the Sorbonne, but gave up his studies.

There followed several years of wandering. He lived by turns in France, Germany and Belgium. In Munich in the mid-1950s he wrote his first novel, “Chronicle of San Gabriel”. In Antwerp he worked in a factory making photographic supplies, and in Germany and France he got by as he could: recycling newspapers, working as a concierge, carrying loads in the metro, selling printing supplies. His first book, “Los gallinazos sin plumas” (“The Featherless Buzzards”), a collection of city stories, was written in Paris and published in Lima in 1955. It takes its title from a story about two boys in a Lima slum whom their cruel grandfather forces to collect rubbish on the tips; it remains Ribeyro’s best-known text.

In 1958 he returned to Lima and published “Cuentos de circunstancias”. He taught at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho and, at the university’s request, set about creating an Institute of Popular Culture (1959). “Chronicle of San Gabriel” was published in 1960 and won the National Novel Prize.

In 1961 he went back to Paris and for about ten years worked for Agence France-Presse. In 1964 two collections appeared at once, “Las botellas y los hombres” and “Tres historias sublevantes”, and in 1965 the novel “Los geniecillos dominicales” (awarded the prize of the newspaper Expreso). In 1972 he became cultural attaché at the Peruvian embassy in Paris, and later worked in Peru’s delegation to UNESCO. In 1973 the first edition of his collected stories, “La palabra del mudo” (“The Word of the Mute”), came out; it was later expanded in 1977 and 1992. In 1976 the novel “Cambio de guardia” appeared.

He also wrote plays (“Santiago, el Pajarero”, 1975; “Atusparia”, 1981), essays (“La caza sutil”, 1975), books of aphorisms and the diary “La tentación del fracaso”. In his own words in a 1992 interview with Jorge Coaguila, about nine-tenths of what he wrote was based on lived experience. His characters usually come from the impoverished middle class or from the poor, and their hopes mostly collapse, but an ironic tone and humour make the prose comic. He chose to keep his distance from the Latin American literary boom.

In 1985 Ribeyro was appointed Peru’s permanent representative to UNESCO with the rank of ambassador, a post he held from 1986 to 1990. In the 1980s he had a sharp quarrel with Mario Vargas Llosa over the nationalisation of the banks proposed by the government of Alan García. Vargas Llosa answered in his memoir “A Fish in the Water” (1993), though he always praised Ribeyro’s prose. It seems to me that the documents do not fully explain the relationship between the two writers, who once shared a Paris flat.

He received the National Prize for Literature in 1983 and the National Prize for Culture in 1993. In 1994 he was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize. He could not travel to Mexico for the ceremony, and his wife and son went in his place. He spent his last years between Europe and Peru, and in 1994 decided to stay in his homeland. He died in Lima on 4 December 1994, a few days after the prize was announced.

He is buried in the Jardines de la Paz cemetery in La Molina; a line from his “Prosas apátridas” is carved on the gravestone.