Mario Vargas Llosa, the colossus of the Latin American novel

For those of us who grew up reading Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1990s, no analysis of his oeuvre is possible without a comparison with his former mentor and friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom Llosa later despised largely over his political views while maintaining respect for him as a writer.

The two Latin American Nobel Prize-winning writers influenced some of us in life-changing ways – we internalised Marquez for his immaculate narration while Llosa unsettled us with contrarian political commentaries that were as cerebral as they were satirical. I have described it before in a review: Marquez brought up politics in his fiction only with the subtlety of a literary Houdini as Llosa remained unabashed about brandishing his ideological stance in his writings . Both were products of what they call the Latin American boom in literature of the second half of the last century.

The first novel by Llosa that I read was his first work of fiction: The Time of the Hero (1963). I immediately connected with it because it tells the story of cadets in a military school named Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Peru, his home country, quite similar to the one I attended in Kerala, Sainik School, where bullying of juniors by seniors was a years-long ordeal bedevilled with sadism, thrashings and even sexual harassment. In the agonising days of a cadet in Lima as well as in Thiruvananthapuram, there were bouts of joy that came from the human spirit for survival and a sense of slum humour. Just as we in school invented the most vulgar of nicknames for our tormentors and teachers and laughed about them behind their backs, cadets in Llosa’s Lima institution – which he had attended as a teenager and where he was subject to extra bullying thanks to his white complexion – poked fun even at the Peruvian hero after whom the school was named: Leoncio Prado. Llosa, who, it appears, had similarities with Alberto the Poet in the novel, poked fun at the meaninglessness of their national hero, who out of reckless bravery and serious bravado, wanted to command the firing squad that executed him. Again, a black character in the novel makes a pronouncement about the statue of Prado on the campus, saying the hero is a pimp because he is pointing at a brothel outside the campus.

It is widely assumed that Llosa borrowed the style from William Faulkner in The Time of the Hero. His later works like Who Killed Palomino Molero? and Death in the Andes, one of my favourites by Llosa, fall under the whodunit genre, which, in the case of Llosa, scales new highs in Feast of the Goat (2000). The book perfectly exemplifies the writer’s ability to depict the decadence of Latin American politics, focusing on the Dominican Republic during the rule of Rafael Trujillo – its dictator assassinated in the early 1960s – through the perspective of Urania Cabral, the abused daughter of one of Trujillo’s early loyalists. The book also brought into public glare the way dictators fall under their own weight, with their own lieutenants plotting their downfall as I had written before. 

Of all his books and essays translated into English from Spanish for international audience, what I consider the best (not necessarily what I loved best) is his 1981 masterpiece The War of The End of the World, a fictionalised version of the War of Canudos in 19th century Brazil, which was perhaps his literary apotheosis, elevating his penchant for tapping real-life characters and their actions in fiction – which he has admitted – gave him the licence to take liberties with facts.

A failed politician – he had contested Peru’s presidential polls unsuccessfully against Alberto Fujimori – Llosa was rabid in his attack of political rivals as well as intellectuals and writers opposed to his views. Llosa drifted away over the decades from Marxism to Reaganomics and libertarianism, and famously called Marquez “the courtesan of Cuba”. He often used fiction, not to speak of essays and interviews, to target his opponents. It might be fair to say that he was more compelling in challenging his ideological opponents through his fiction than in his explicit political commentaries – many of which, such as his 2006 collection Touchstones, which explores literature and geopolitics, have been translated into English.

Now, Llosa was a stunningly prolific writer. Out of his political misadventure too came a book titled A Fish in the Water (1993), which is rife with no-holds-barred criticism of many Leftist intellectuals of Peru. He took the opportunity to recollect childhood memories. He said he was sober and indifferent in his loss to Fujimori and then brought up an instance from his childhood to perhaps justify it – he and his cousins were taught at a young age not to cry in public, which was why, Llosa writes in the book that when one of his close relatives died when he was a teen, he and a cousin of the same age group didn’t cry even while the elders sobbed because they were taught that “grown-up men don’t cry in public”.

A high praise for Llosa’s drive and hard work came from contemporary Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta, whose novel Ardiente Paciencia was later adapted into the iconic movie Il Postino. He said in the early pages of his work that in a certain period when he managed to write two books, Llosa had written 14 – only a fraction of his life’s work.

Many of us Marquez fans, too, had read more of Llosa simply because he had written more – and refused to stop writing. Marquez and Llosa had fallen out even before the former won his Nobel in 1982, twenty-eight years before Llosa won his. The reasons for their fallout in 1976 – after Llosa punched Marquez in the face at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, giving him a black eye which the latter allowed to be photographed — are still a hot topic for wild theories and debates.

Although Llosa was more intellectual and gifted with knowledge of languages (other than Spanish) than Marquez, critics have widely assessed him a few notches below Marquez as a novelist. But Llosa was a genius still who revelled in multiple genres.

It is no secret that his being a difficult man by earning more enemies than friends in Latin America did take a toll on Llosa’s standing. But his international stature as one of the region’s most talented writers remains undisputed. His versatility – as a soccer commentator, essayist, speaker, playwright and a connoisseur of art and culture – won him much acclaim.

Influenced by American writers, Marquez himself — in fact, Llosa’s doctoral thesis of 1971 was on Marquez, his then friend – and Borges, among others, Llosa was far more intensely realistic in his fictional plots, which endeared him to his millions of admirers around the world. His other works that include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (semi-autobiographical because aged 19, Llosa was married to a much older relative), Conversation in The Cathedral, The Storyteller, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Way to Paradise (a historical novel about the artist Paul Gauguin), The Bad Girl, The Dream of the Celt, The Discreet Hero, The Neighborhood, Harsh Times, among a raft of his non-fiction works (my favourite being Letters to a Young Novelist) doubtlessly place him among the titans of Latin American literature like Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and others.

Interestingly, he diverged in his ideological and political views from most others in the region. However, he remained skeptical of libertarianism, too, especially the prognosis for the world by the likes of Francis Fukuyama and others. Strangely enough, in Harsh Times, he was highly critical of the West. He talks about how democratisation and modernisation in Latin America in the 20th century were derailed by American foreign policy and its post-WWII crony capitalism. In the book, he talks about the CIA-backed invasion of Guatemala of 1954 (Operation PBSuccess) to unseat the government of Jacobo Arbenz – an event he described as a case of American folly that caused devastating damage to the whole region. The outcome, he argued, is that previously pro-democratic nationalist parties in the region were forced to ally with the former Soviet Union for fear of American aggression – it’s no wonder that the myth of armed struggle became immensely popular hence.  

Llosa – who lived an abundantly colourful life – was a literary colossus who held up a mirror to the international community and explored the underbellies of nations through fiction in a way few others did. Now that he is gone, his books may partially fill that void.

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