Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian author and politician, dies
The celebrated writer of historical novels, mysteries, plays and essays was an unshakeable defender of democracy, personal liberties and free markets who feared the rise of nationalists in Europe and the US.
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize-winning author who ran for president in his native Peru and wrote vivid novels that explored themes of despotism, corruption and fanaticism in Latin America, has died.
One of the Spanish-speaking world’s most celebrated writers, Vargas Llosa was the last living member of the Latin American boom of the 1960s and ’70s that included literary giants such as Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico.
In a career spanning six decades and an array of genres, he wrote riveting historical novels, semi-autobiographical comedies, murder mysteries, political essays and plays.
Known for weaving together plots with alternating narrators, Vargas Llosa said he fell in love with storytelling as a child and wrote almost every morning, even well into his 80s when he was living in Spain.
“Writing is in my nature,” Vargas Llosa told The Paris Review in a 1990 interview. “If I didn’t write, I would blow my brains out, without a shadow of a doubt.”
He died on Sunday in Lima at 89 years old.
His novels include The Feast of the Goat, a political thriller centred on the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, tyrant of the Dominican Republic until 1961; The War of the End of the World, an epic account of a violent 19th century uprising by a fanatical Brazilian cult; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, inspired by his first marriage when still a teenager to his uncle’s sister-in-law, a divorcee 13 years his senior.
Vargas Llosa was a political animal too, and believed Latin American writers were morally obliged to participate in civic life.
As a young man in the 1950s and ’60s, he was a Marxist who enthusiastically supported the Cuban Revolution, seeing it as a model for Latin America. He broke with Havana in 1971 when the regime jailed poet Heberto Padilla, accusing him of writing counter-revolutionary poems.
Later, Vargas Llosa became an unshakeable defender of democracy, personal liberties and free markets at a time when the region was polarised between leftist revolutionaries and right-wing dictatorships.
His belief that private enterprise and political freedom were inseparable turned him into an ideological outsider among members of Latin America’s intelligentsia, who were often deeply influenced by leftist revolutionary rhetoric.
In speeches and newspaper columns, Vargas Llosa assailed Latin American caudillos on both the left and right, and sparred with writers he saw as propping them up. He referred to García Márquez, a Nobel laureate who was a friend of Fidel Castro and staunch supporter of Cuba, as “Castro’s courtesan’’. Their close friendship ended when Vargas Llosa punched the Colombian in the eye at a Mexico City theatre in 1976, touching off decades of essays by critics that never determined with certainty what caused the kerfuffle.
For Vargas Llosa, literature was vital to a healthy society.
“Through writing, one can change history,” Vargas Llosa told The Wall Street Journal in 2007. “I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.”
Born in the mountain city of Arequipa, Peru, in 1936, Vargas Llosa was raised by a single mother in the middle-class home of his maternal grandparents in Bolivia. They later settled in Piura, a Peruvian desert town. Vargas Llosa said his pampered childhood ended at age 10 with the arrival of his father, who he had been told was dead after his parents had separated.
With his parents back together, Vargas Llosa was whisked off to Lima. Books became an escape from his father’s violent outbursts, Vargas Llosa wrote in his 1993 memoir, A Fish in the Water.
“I probably wouldn’t be a writer today if in those years I had not suffered so much when he was around and if I hadn’t felt that (literature) was the best way I could think of to pull the wool over his eyes,” he wrote.
Vargas Llosa’s father sent him to a military boarding school at 14 after discovering he wrote poems, hoping to toughen him up. But at Lima’s Leoncio Prado Military School, then a microcosm of Peru’s ethnically diverse and deeply unequal society, Vargas Llosa read voraciously and said he became a writer.
The military academy inspired his early novel, The Time of the Hero, which graphically depicts the school’s cruel bullying and social hierarchy. The book won literary awards, but the military accused the author of tarnishing the armed forces and burned 1000 copies.
At Peru’s San Marcos University in the 1950s, Vargas Llosa joined an underground communist cell opposed to the dictatorship of Gen. Manuel Odría. That period inspired his novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, with its famous opening line: “At what precise moment did Peru screw itself?”
When Vargas Llosa was 19 years old, he secretly married Julia Urquidi, his uncle’s sister-in-law. His father threatened to kill him. “He added that I could go to the police to ask for help,” Vargas Llosa wrote years later, “but that would not keep him from pumping five shots into me.”
Vargas Llosa and his wife moved to Paris in 1959, where he met other Latin American novelists living abroad and was influenced by the works of French author Gustave Flaubert. Decades later, after having written some of his novels in Paris, Vargas Llosa was in 2023 inducted into the prestigious Académie Française, considered the official arbiter of the French language even though he had never published in French.
Vargas Llosa and Urquidi divorced in 1964. Shortly after, he married a cousin, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children. They divorced in 2016.
Vargas Llosa’s work was often intertwined with his life. “I feel that everything I do and that is done to me – all of my life – is nothing more than a pretext for inventing stories,” the author wrote in one essay in his book, Making Waves.
He wrote most prominently about himself in Fish in the Water, in which he recounted his foray into Peruvian politics. In 1987, he wrote a newspaper column denouncing then-president Alan García’s attempt to nationalise banks. That led to protests and set into motion Vargas Llosa’s 1990 run for the presidency amid an economic crisis and bloody Maoist insurgency.
Vargas Llosa believed drastic market reforms were the only way to turn around what he called an “indescribably wretched country” and pledged to privatise state companies and use austerity measures to tackle hyperinflation.
Vargas Llosa’s candidacy was torpedoed by a sudden surge of support for a little-known university professor, Alberto Fujimori, a son of Japanese immigrants who drew poor voters amid a backlash against Peru’s traditional political parties and a white, ruling elite. Vargas Llosa was associated with that elite.
After winning the election, Fujimori implemented many of Vargas Llosa’s economic prescriptions, which economists credit with laying the groundwork for years of rapid growth.
Vargas Llosa criticised Fujimori from abroad. Fearing Fujimori would rescind his citizenship, Vargas Llosa became a Spanish citizen.
In later years, Vargas Llosa worried about the rise of nationalist movements in Europe and the US, and the erosion of democracy in Latin America.
He fretted about the future of literature, but also spoke about how he still found comfort with a pen and paper. At his Nobel acceptance speech in 2010, he described writing a novel as “dizzying as making love to the woman you love for days, weeks, months, without stopping’’.
He later told a BBC interviewer, “I’d like death to find me writing, like an accident.”
The Wall Street Journal
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