Remembering Mario Vargas Llosa

Photo by Daniel Devoti, courtesy of Wikicommons

Franklin Nelson

There is a close-up black-and-white photograph of Mario Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima on 13 April at the age of 89, in which the Peruvian writer is facing the camera with his eyes closed and right forearm brought tightly across the crown of his head. Between his left thumb and forefinger the old man holds a slim fountain pen over his left temple. From its nib a speck of ink has dropped on to his lined forehead, as if to suggest the smallest nick of blood. Is he in pain or at peace? It’s not easy to tell. What is certain, though, is that the pen is his weapon of choice. Even as he declines to meet our gaze, he wants us to know it is just as mighty as any sword that might be pointed in his direction. 

Vargas Llosa’s death ended a six-decade career in which he sought both to unveil the workings of power and how it comes to be abused, and represent Latin America, its history and children in a new light. In that sense it ended an era, too. To be sure, the writer put down his pen to dip into politics more than once: having started out on the left, in 1990 he unsuccessfully ran to be Peru’s president for a coalition of centre-right parties, and three years ago he drew controversy when he said that, given the choice, he would back right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro over Lula to lead Brazil.

But with international acclaim around his words capped by the Nobel Prize in 2010 – awarded by the Swedish Academy ‘for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat’ – literature, whether fiction, criticism or drama, was his true domain. Vargas Llosa knew as much. ‘The most important thing that happened to me in life was learning to read’, he said once, noting elsewhere that ‘my best adventures are more literary than political’.   

Vargas Llosa started out early, reading canonical French writers such as Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo and reporting on crime for a Peruvian newspaper from the age of 15. The vein of documenting social reality, and urging changes to it, runs through his œuvre and is evident in his debut novel from 1963. La ciudad y los perros, translated into English three years later as The Time of the Hero, treats the passage from boyhood to manhood in a military academy, where student life is strictly and arbitrarily policed. On publication of this book in which satire and social critique meet experimental prose, the authorities publicly burned 1,000 copies. 

Vargas Llosa knew the institution he described, having been enrolled at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy by his father, who hoped time there would rid his son of his desire to write. The attempt failed spectacularly. The Time of the Hero not only marked the start of a long writing life but helped spark the ‘Boom’ period, as a global audience discovered Latin American literature through a generation of authors including Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, Júlio Cortazar of Argentina, and Mexico-born Carlos Fuentes. 

Later works evinced Vargas Llosa’s distaste for figures and manifestations of authority whose objective was to curb individual freedom. Conversation in the Cathedral (1975) (Conversación en la cathedral, 1969) is set during the dictatorship of Manuel Odría, who governed Peru in the 1950s. Unspooling to take in many more voices and experiences, the initial conversation of the title is between a white man, Santiago, who has spurned his inheritance as the son of a wealthy family to work in journalism, and a black man, Ambrosio, who used to chauffeur the family, in their ‘cathedral’ of choice, a bar. 

‘The novel is the private history of nations’, wrote Honoré de Balzac, whose words Vargas Llosa selected as an epigraph to that 600-page, two-volume novel. The men’s dialogue is less about themselves than about how grand historical forces such as liberty, race, class, and sex have shaped their homeland. Later The Feast of the Goat (2001) (La fiesta del chivo, 2000) probed the murderous regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic from multiple vantage points, forming a kind of collage of the effects over time of autocratic power on society, as well as on those who wield it. 

Santiago from Conversation in the Cathedral might be seen as a stand-in for Vargas Llosa, as a man who took a different path to the one laid out for him. The author inserted himself more clearly into the story of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982), published in Spanish in 1977 as La tía Julia y el escribidor. This novel, whose main character is Marito Varguitas, traces Vargas Llosa’s experience of falling in love with and later wedding his aunt by marriage, Julia Urquidi. Again narrative perspective shuttles between characters as the ups-and-downs of personal and professional life are unpicked. But the tone is decidedly more humorous, even if love had a profound role in Vargas Llosa’s own life: he memorably fell out with García Marquez over women, and in 2015 left his second wife, Patricia, for Spanish-Filipina socialite Isabel Preysler, only to return to Patricia seven years later.

Amid all the comings and goings, writing remained a constant, with regular columns in the Spanish daily El País (Vargas Llosa acquired Spanish citizenship in 1993 but retained Peruvian nationality) enabling him to keep in touch with his journalistic roots. In his last novel, Le dedico mi silencio (2023; I dedicate my silence to you, as yet untranslated into English), we return to Lima, following another journalist in his search to tell the life story of a leading practitioner of creole music, which, in the world of this novel at least, bridges social divides. Vargas Llosa’s final protagonist might not get where he wants to go, but that is arguably not the point. Individual commitment and the ideal of a better, more unified society: they are what the author wanted his readers to take forward. 

Franklin Nelson

Franklin Nelson works for the Financial Times, commissioning and writing on UK politics, the economy and society as well as books and the arts.