Alfredo Bryce Echenique is a Peruvian writer born in Lima. He has written several books and short stories. This article is about Lima, Peru. ...

Biography

Son of a well-off, English-Peruvian family on February 19th, 1939. Upon the wish of his family, Bryce Echenique studied law in the National University of Saint Mark until 1964. His literary interest nevertheless prevailed and so, shortly afterwards, he completed a parallel study course in literature with a thesis on Ernest Hemingway. A year later he received a grant from the French government which, like many other Latin American authors of the boom period, led him to Paris. At the Sorbonne he studied classic and modern French literature and then taught at various French schools and universities. February 19 is the 50th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... The National University of San Marcos (in Spanish Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos) is a public university in Lima, Perú. Is the oldest university in South America, and one of the oldest in the Western Hemisphere. ... The Sorbonne, Paris, in a 17th century engraving The Sorbonne today, from the same point of view The historic University of Paris (French: Université de Paris) first appeared in the second half of the 12th century, but was in 1970 reorganized as 13 autonomous universities (University of Paris I–XIII). ...

After the story volume "Huerto cerrado" came out in 1968, his first novel "Un mundo para Julius" became a big success and counts today as one of the classics of Latin American literature. The novel, which has since been translated into ten languages, tells the story of a young boy who grows up as the youngest of four children of a rich, Peruvian upper class family. Although Julius actually belongs to the ruling classes he feels a stronger bond with the servants which surround him and this brings him into conflict with his family. With biting irony the author exposes, through the eyes of a child, the great social differences in Peruvian society.

Un mundo para Julius marks for Bryce Echenique the start of an extremely productive literary career, in which he has until today written nearly twenty novels and story volumes.

I am an author of the second half of the 20th century. Despite this declaration and his spatial and temporal closeness to other Latin American authors of the "boom generation", Bryce Echenique keeps a conscious distance to his colleagues who he sometimes refers to as "nouveau riche". That his style, as one critic once said, corresponds more to an ironic than a magic realism, is shown by the author also in his last novel La amigdalitis de Tarzán from 1999. Largely in the form of letters, the novel tells the story of the hindered romantic relationship between a poor Peruvian writer and the daughter of an influential Salvadorian family.

Similar to his heroes, Alfredo Bryce Echenique also lived for decades far away from his home city of Lima to which he only returned to in 1999.