Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025): Maestro from Peru

Mario Vargas Llosa, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Lit­erature in 2010, was one of the world’s greatest writers of the post-World War II era.He died on April 13, aged 89. Although he lived the last years of his life mostly in Spain, he returned in the end to Peru, his home country, to die.

In his writing career span­ning seven decades, he had lived in multiple cities, includ­ing Paris and London, and had worked as a journalist and a teacher. Besides the Nobel, he had won numerous other awards, including the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Carlos Fuentes International Prize, the Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit, etc. Spain and France had bestowed him with coveted honours, making him one of the most decorated writers of his time.

A product of the Latin Ameri­can Boom, his early novels effervesced with innocence even as he straddled genres, from crime fiction to historical novels, bringing to the fore intensely realistic portrayals of human nature, politics, and life. He was also an unsparing essayist, hav­ing veered away from Marxism towards neoliberalism and sup­port for right-wing politics. He however remained a sceptic all his life, distrusting all kinds of authoritarianism and tyranny.

Meanwhile, this change in ideological position also meant that he lost friends, most significantly fellow Boomer Gabriel Garcia Márquez. An apocryphal story has it that shortly before Llosa was to punch Márquez in the face in 1976 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, a widely documented incident, the former’s wife Patricia had report­edly whispered to Llosa that he shouldn’t argue with his Columbian friend, but he punched hard right away. The wife’s logic was that Peruvians were bad fighters.

Both writers never disclosed the reason for the fallout, taking their secret to the grave, Marquez on April 17, 2014 and Llosa now.

Neither their parting of ways nor their divergent political views hurt their writing or literary glory although Marquez, who was born in 1927, had won the Nobel as early as 1982, aged 55. Llosa was 74 when his turn came.

While, arguably, most read­ers of Marquez loved him for his politics, Llosa’s readers loved him despite his politics, stating that Llosa the writer and Llosa the (failed) politician had to be seen as distinct entities. Llosa had stood for President in 1990 against Alberto Fujimori in an unsuccess­ful campaign arguing against the nationalisation of banks and other institutions, promising to usher in something akin to Thatcherism, guided by Reaganomics.

In his 2018 collection of essays titled ‘The Call of the Tribe’, Llosa mapped the readings that shaped his evolution over 50 years, pay­ing homage to seven people he finally came to vastly respect: Adam Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-Francois Revel.

What motivated him to reassess his ideological affinities were a set of events, especially Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s sup­port for the Soviet invasion of erstwhile Czechoslovakia in 1968 that ended the Prague Spring; and the so-called Padilla affair in Cuba, involving poet Heberto Padilla who was accused of being a counter-revolutionary and jailed. Llosa had shot off a long letter in 1968 to Marquez who later said that he had to drink “half a litre of whisky” to digest it.

Apart from his engagement in the battle of political ideas, Llosa went on to produce world-class fiction and non-fiction works. Starting with The Time of the Hero in 1963, he contin­ued to mesmerise his readers across the political divide with outstanding novels that include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Storyteller, In Praise of the Step­mother, The Way to Paradise, The Bad Girl, The Feast of the Goat and others, all of which, without exception, were as provocative as they were unpredictable.

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