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Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) |
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Peruvian novelist, playwright, essayist and literary critic, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Mario Vargas Llosa is 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 has followed the tradition of social protest of Peruvian fiction exposing political corruption, machismo, racial prejudices and violence, he has 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. His father, Ernesto
Vargas Maldonado, was a radio telegrapher, whose adventurous spirit
passed down as an inheritance to his son.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, where he 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 he 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 on the character of Emma. In the 1950s, while still a student, 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. His first
collection of short stories, Los
Jefes 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, with whom he had three children. García Márquez became a godfather to his son, but after 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. In 2015, after 50 years of marriage, he left Patricia for Isabel Preysler, the ex-wife of the Spanish singer and songwriter Julio Iglesias. Along with such names as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and García Márquez, Vargas Llosa belonged to a group of writers, whose aim was to revitalize the Latin American novel. Vargas Llosa moved to Paris because he felt that in Peru he could not earn his living as a serious writer. 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. In France Vargas Llosa 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 many American and European universities. In 1970 Vargas Llosa moved to Barcelona and five years later he settled back in Peru, 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. Vargas Llosa was a conservative candidate (Fredemo, the Democratic Front) for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. The development of his political convictions, from a sympathizer of Cuban revolution to the liberal right, has astonished his critics and has made it impossible to approach his work from a single point of view. Sabine Köllmann has noted that the publication of Vargas Llosa's 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) Vargas Llosa was defeated by Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer of Japanese descent, also a political novice, but who had a more straightforward agenda to present to the voters. 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. 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, the author has 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). 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. Autobiography and art has been one of the themes in his criticism. One of Vargas Llosa's own obsessions is the conflict between a father and son, which he has approached from the private level or from more universal or social levels. The Time of the Hero is a microcosm of Peruvian society. The murder of an informer is buried due to the codes of honor to protect the academy's reputation. La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) is 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 returned to formative experiences of his childhood and youth. The complicated novel has two major settings: the first, a provincial city, and the second, the jungle, a challenging, hostile and attractive environment, which the author has depicted in several works. In 1957 Varga Llosa travelled with a group of anthropologists into the jungle, 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. A religious fanatic, known as Conselheiro (Counselor), is followed by a huge band of disciples drawn from the fringes of society. Before the army of the Republic wins, the modern rational world suffers several humiliating defeats with the group of outcasts. Vargas Llosa uses 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) moves on several narrative levels. It deals with a failed Marxist-Leninist insurrection in the Andes, led by an aging Trotskyist Alejandro Mayta. He is captured and his second lieutenant Vallejos executed. The novelist-narrator interviews a number of people who give a contradictory view of Mayta's personality and the events. Finally the reader realizes that in the process of creating a novel within a novel, the narrator has invented Mayta's life and undermined the concepts of writing and reading history. Besides fiction, Vargas Llosa has publushed a large body of
essays, criticism, and literary and political journalism. A writer with
an international readership, his foreign reportage has 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, he 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) Vargas Llosa's bitter memoir,
El pez en el agua (A Fish in the Water), appeared in 1993. It
focused on his run for the presidency in 1990 – he was supposed to win
the little-known Alberto Fujimori. 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 has 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. The era of strong leaders is not totally over in Latin America, as one of the latest examples, Fujimori, sadly proved. 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 serve the humanity, to create a worker's paradise. Gauguin leaves civilization behind and eventually rots alive 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 J.L. 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) Selected works:
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