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Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025) |
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Peruvian novelist, playwright, essayist and literary critic, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Mario Vargas Llosa was one of the central writers in the Hispanic world, but he began his literary career in Europe. Most of his novels are set in Peru. From his first works, Vargas Llosa has used a wide variety of avant-garde techniques to create an aesthetic "double of the real world." Although Vargas Llosa followed the tradition of social protest of Peruvian fiction exposing political corruption, machismo, racial prejudices and violence, he underlined that a writer should never preach or compromise artistic aims for ideological propaganda. "His voice was persuasive; it reached a person's soul without passing by way of his head, and even to a being as addlebrained as Big João, it seemed like a balm that healed old and terrible wounds. João stood there listening to him, rooted to the spot, not even blinking, moved to his very bones by what he was hearing and by the music of the voice uttering those words. The figure of the saint was blurred at times by the tears that welled up in João's eyes. When the man went on his way, he began to follow him at a distance, like a timid animal." (from The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen R. Lane, New York: Avon Books, 1987, p. 30; original title La guerra del fin del mundo, 1981) Mario
Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, but from ages one to
ten he lived in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he was brought up by his
mother and maternal grandparents after his parents separated. However,
Vargas Llosa once said, that "I feel very much an Arequipan". He also
spent some time in Piura, northern Peru (1945-46), where his
grandfather had been appointed as Prefect, and then in Lima. When he
was about eight years old his parents reconciled. Ernesto
Vargas Maldonado, his father, was a radio telegrapher with an adventurous spirit. Vargas
Llosa's mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, came from a highly respected family. Vargas
Llosa attended Leoncio Prado Military Academy
(1950-52), where he was sent by his father. He had discovered that his
son wrote poems and wanted to stop him doing it. After two
miserable years, during which he read voraciously, he returned to
Piura, and finished Colegio Nacional San Miguel. While studying literature and law at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Vargas
Llosa held several jobs, including working as an assistant to the historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea. He
also belonged to a communist cell that read and discussed Marx. Upsetting his whole family, Vargas Llosa
married in 1955 Julia Urquidi Illanes, originally his aunt by marriage. When they wed, she was ten years his senior. They divorced in 1964. At the age of twenty-two, Vargas Llosa moved to Madrid. He
attended graduate school at the University of Madrid, receiving his
Ph.D. in 1959. His doctoral dissertation
about García Márquez (1971) was followed by
several books on literary criticism, among them La orgía perpetua (1975), about Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary.
Decades later, in Travesuras de la
niña mala
(2006), Vargas Llosa drew from the character of Emma Bovary. In the 1950s Vargas Llosa worked as a
journalist for La Industria. He was a coeditor of the literary
journals Cuadernos de Conversación and Literatura, and
journalist for Radio Panamericana and La Crónica. Los
Jefes, his first
collection of short stories, came out in 1959. "I liked Faulkner but I imitated
Hemingway," he said later. Because the first wedding was a civil ceremony, performed by a mayor of a small Peruvian village, it had not been recognized. In 1965 Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa Urquidi. They had three children. García Márquez became a godfather to his son. Following a brawl in a Mexican cinema in 1976, the friendship of two writers ended bitterly. However, in 2006 Vargas Llosa allowed an excerpt from his Historia secreta de una novela (1971) to be published in the 40th anniversary edition of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although
the boom of Latin American fiction in the 1960s opened doors to some
authors for commercial success, the great majority of Peruvian writers
suffered from the problems of the country's publishing industry.
Feeling
that in Peru he could not earn his living as a serious writer, Vargas
Llosa moved to Paris.
He worked as Spanish teacher, journalist
for Agence-France-Presse, and broadcaster for Radio Télévision
Française in early 1960s. From the late 1960s Vargas Llosa held several
positions as a
visiting professor at American and European universities. In 1970
Vargas Llosa settled in Barcelona. Five years later, before completely
losing his connections with his home country, Vargas Llosa returned
back to
Peru, thus ending
his self-imposed exile. Vargas Llosa was a member of the 1976 Cannes
Film Festival jury, led by Tennessee Williams; Martin Scorsese's Taxi
Driver won that year's Palme d'Or. In 1977 he was elected President
of PEN Club International. The military dictatorship, which started in
1968 when General Francisco Morales Bermudez took over the country,
ended in 1980. Along with such names as
Julio
Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and García Márquez, Vargas Llosa aimed to revitalize the Latin American
novel. The development
of Vargas Llosa's political convictions, from a sympathizer of Cuban revolution to
the liberal right, has puzzled his readers and critics. It difficult to approach his work from a fixed point of view. Sabine
Köllmann has noted that the publication of La Fiesta del Chivo (2000, The
Feast of the Goat) confirmed, "that politics is one of the most
persistent 'demons' which, according to his theory, provoke his
creativity." (Vargas Llosa's Fiction & the Demons of Politics,
Peter Lang AG, 2002, p. 10) Upon becoming a politician, Vargas Llosa ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 and was defeated by Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer of Japanese descent, a political novice too. An unexpected twist in the plot of this political play occurerred in 2000, when President Fujimori escaped to his ancestral homeland Japan after a corruption scandal. El pez en el agua (1993, A Fish in the Water), Vargas Llosa's bitter memoir, focused on his run for the presidency. He had allied himself with two parties: Acción Popular and the Democracia Cristiana, and was supposed to win, but the little-known Fujimori was presented as a new candidate with fresh ideas. When Vargas Llosa was asked in an interview in 2015, what would have happened, if he had become president, he replied: "The only thing that is certain is that for five years I would not have written novels. I would have written many speeches, and surely my reading would have been very impoverished: instead of literature, I would have had to read briefings and many reports." (Conversation at Princeton by Mario Vargas Llosa, with Rubén Gallo, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner, New York: Picador, 2023, p. 181) From 1991 to 1992 Vargas Llosa worked as a visiting professor at Florida International University, Miami and Wissdenschaftskolleg, Berlin. In addition to the Nobel Prize – when the Swedish Academy called him, it was early in the morning, and he was reading on the sofa – Vargas Llosa received many other honors. Among the most notable are Leopoldo Alas Prize (1959), Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1967), National Critics' Prize (1967), Peruvian National Prize (1967), Critics' Annual Prize for Theatre (1981), Prince of Asturias Prize (1986) and Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1994). In 2015, after 50 years of marriage, Vargas Llosa left his wife for Isabel Preysler, the ex-wife of the Spanish singer and songwriter Julio Iglesias. Mario Vargas Llosa died at home in Lima, on 13 April, 2025. He was 89. Vargas Llosa made his debut as a novelist with La ciudad y los perros (1962, The
Time of the Hero), set in Leoncio Prado military Academy, where he had
been a student. The book received an immediate international
recognition. According to Vargas Llosa's theory, personal, social or
historical daemon gives a meaning to a novel and in the writing process
unconscious obsessions are transformed into a novelist's themes. One of Vargas Llosa's obsessions was the conflict between a father and son. La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) was a partly autobiographical story of a courtship and marriage, written with uninhibited humor. The tyrannical father threatens to shoot his son, a novelist named Marito Varguitas, in the middle of the street, because of his marriage to the sexy, sophisticated, older Aunt Julia, the sister-in-law of his uncle. Marito is eighteen and the marriage is illegal. Eventually his father accepts the situation. The book started to live its own life when Aunt Julia, Vargas Llosa's first wife, wrote a reply to it, entitled Lo que Varguitas no Dijo. In La casa verde (1966, The Green House) Vargas Llosa took a look at formative experiences of his childhood and youth. The complicated novel has two major settings: the first, a provincial city, and the second, the jungle. In 1957 Varga Llosa had travelled with a group of anthropologists, and learned how Indian girls were being drafted into prostitution on the coast. The "Green House" of the story is a brothel, which is burned to the ground but rebuilt again. Another storyline follows the fate of the virginal Bonifacia from a jungle mission; she becomes a prostitute in Piura. La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, The War of the End of the World) is a story of a revolt against the Brazilian government in the late 19th-century and the brutal response of the authorities. Vargas Llosa used Euclides da Cunha's account of the events, Os sertões (1902), as a source. One of the characters, a "nearsighted journalist," is loosely based on da Cunha. Historia de Mayta
(1983, The Real life of Alejandro Mayta) is a novel within a novel, in which Vargas Llosa undermines the concepts of writing and reading
history. A Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, an aging Trotskyist named Alejandro Mayta is captured and his second lieutenant is executed. The novelist-narrator
interviews a number of people who give contradictory evidence on Mayta's
personality and the events. Besides fiction, Vargas Llosa publushed a large body of
essays, criticism, and literary and political journalism. A writer with
an international readership, his foreign reportage appeared in The
New York Times Le Monde, The Times Literary Supplement,
El País, and other influential newspapers. Vargas Llosa's
articles about the war in Iraq,
written for El Pais, were collected in Diario de Irak (2003). With his daughter Morgana, a photographer, Vargas Llosa traveled to Israel and Palestine in 2005, and recorded his impressions in Israel/Palestina. Paz o guerra santa (2006). The book was received with mixed reactions among the Jewish community in South America. "Israel had become a powerful and arrogant country, and it is the role of its friends to be highly critical of its policies", Vargas Llosa said in an interview. (Haaretz, July 9, 2006) The Feast of the Goat
continued the author's political excursion into the recent history of
South America. The story is set in the Dominican Republic in 1961,
ruled by the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Urania Chabral has
returned to the noisy Santo Domingo to visit her father, Agustin
Chabral, who is ill. He is a former Dominican senator, a faithful
servant of the dictator. "And how many times did you come home saddened
because he did not call to you, fearful you were no longer in the
circle of the elect, that you had fallen among the censured?" (The Feast of the Goat, translated by Edith Grossman, New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, p. 8)
Eventually "Minister Cabral, Egghead Cabral" lost his favor. Urania
left the country as a schoolgirl, three and a half decades ago, just
before Trujillo's assassination in 1961. Urania wants revenge against
father for everything he did not do, and has her own reasons to examine
the Trujillo Era. "The most important thing that happened to us in five
hundred years. You used to say that with so much conviction. It's true,
Papa. During those thirty-one years, all the evil we had carried with
us since the Conquest became crystallized." (Ibid., p. 46) Vargas Llosa portrays Trujillo as a superman intoxicated by his political and sexual powers, and worshipped by his demonic henchmen working in torture dungeons. "Oddly, Vargas Llosa's Trujillo sees himself as having gotten the short end of the bargain. He whipped his pathetic homeland into shape, modernized its attitudes and highways and in return he got -- old." (Walter Kirn, in the New York Times, November 25, 2001) Vargas Llosa structured the story like a thriller, leading the reader into the heart of the darkness. The Feast of the Goat is a highly topical book. There is no shortage of authoritative leaders in Latin American politics and fiction. In El paraíso en la otra esquina (2002) two exceptional individuals, the socialist Flora Tristan, and her grandson, the painter Paul Gauguin, are inspired by great ideas. Flora devotes her life to create a workers' paradise and Gauguin leaves civilization behind to die in Atuana, Marguesas Island, in a tropical paradise. El sueño del celta (2010) again portayed an idealist, Sir Roger Casement, a diplomat and an Irish nationalist, who revealed human rights abuses in Congo and Peru, and was executed in 1916 by the British for treason. For further reading: Mario Vargas Llosa's Pursuit of the Total Novel by Luis A. Diez (1970); La narrativa de Vargas Llosa by José Luis Martin (1974); Mario Vargas Llosa by José Oviedo (1981); Vargas Llosa: La ciudad y los perros by Peter Standish (1982); Mario Vargas Llosa by Dick Gwerdes (1985); Mario Vargas Llosa by Raymond L. Williams (1986); Novel Lives by Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal (1986); Mario Vargas Llosa by Roy C. Boland (1988); My Life With Mario Vargas Llosa by Julia Urquidi Illanes (1988); Sobre la vida y la política by A. Ricardo Sett (1989); El metateatro y la dramátice de Vargas Llosa by Oscar Rivera-Rodas (1992); Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa by Sara Castro-Klaren (1992); Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists by M. Keith Booker (1994); Vargas Llosa's Fiction & the Demons of Politics by Sabine Koellmann (2002); The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, edited by Efraín Kristal and John King (2012); Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa by Sabine Köllmann (2014); Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life of Writing by Raymond Leslie Williams (2014); Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa: a Retrospective, edited by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó (2020); La herencia de Mario Vargas Llosa en la narrativa hispanoamericana contemporánea by Luca Breusa (2022) Selected works:
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