Dos adolescentes vecinos: los protagonistas de los cuentos Día domingo de Mario Vargas Llosa y Una mano en las cuerdas (páginas de un diario) de Alfredo Bryce Echenique

Abstract

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936), Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is one of the representatives of the Latin American Boom Literature. Alfredo Bryce Echenique (1939) is considered one of the writers that belongs to the Latin American Post Boom Literature period. Their works reflect aspects of the contemporary history of Peru and in some of them the city of Lima is the stage where these narratives are developed. Both authors begin their literary works in a collection of juvenile short-stories: Vargas Llosa with Los Jefes (1959), and Alfredo Bryce Echenique with Huerto Cerrado (1968). This paper compares the short-stories “Día domingo”, by Mario Vargas Llosa and “Una mano en las cuerdas (Páginas de um diário)” by Alfredo Bryce Echenique, short-stories that present similarities and differences in the narrative of the protagonists, young boys of the middle class, set in the early year of the fifties of the twentieth century, they deserve our attention. Elements present in both stories, such as, for example: the discovery of first love, the importance of friendship and its influence in the adolescent world, the presence of machismo and social behavior of the time.