Los genios

García Márquez and Vargas Llosa met at the Caracas airport in August 1967. At just thirty-one years old, Vargas Llosa was already a critically acclaimed writer. García Márquez, forty years old, finally found publishing success with One Hundred Years of Solitude, published that year in Buenos Aires. Before embracing each other in a hug at the Caracas airport that formally began their friendship, the two literary geniuses had written letters and read each other with admiration. They became close friends, neighbors in the Sarrià neighborhood in Barcelona and even compadres. Vargas Llosa published in 1971 a book in homage to García Márquez, titled History of a deicide. Against all odds, the friendship was poisoned and marred forever. In February 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in a theater in Mexico City, knocking him down and leaving him dazed, with a black eye and a broken nose, while saying: "This is because of what you did to Patricia". What did García Márquez do to Patricia Llosa, Mario's wife? Why did Vargas Llosa punch García Márquez? What intimate circumstances corrupted that friendship that seemed unbreakable? Why didn't they meet again or talk to each other for decades? Why did they become irreconcilable enemies, unable to forgive each other, despite the efforts of their literary agent Carmen Balcells? The Geniuses, the most ambitious and fascinating novel by Jaime Bayly, recreates with formidable narrative verve the glorious years in which García Márquez and Vargas Llosa were great friends and explores, from the licenses of fiction, the secrets, felonies, denunciations and the volcanic anger that thunderously dynamited that friendship that seemed unbreakable.