Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa is a prominent Peruvian novelist and political figure, recognized as one of the key figures in the new Latin American literature movement alongside contemporaries like Gabriel García Márquez. Born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936, Vargas Llosa's early life was shaped by familial upheaval and diverse cultural experiences in Bolivia and Peru. His literary career gained momentum in the 1960s, beginning with his groundbreaking novel "The Time of the Hero," which critiqued the Peruvian military and educational system. Throughout his career, Vargas Llosa has tackled themes of power, politics, and social injustice, earning numerous accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 for his exploration of individual resistance within oppressive structures.
In addition to fiction, he has written extensively on literary criticism, viewing it as a creative process akin to novel writing. Vargas Llosa has also ventured into politics, running for president of Peru in 1990 as a proponent of democratic centrism. Despite facing criticism from various political factions, his influence remains significant. He has continued to produce literary works into the 2020s, recently announcing that his latest novel, "Le dedico mi silencio," will be his last fiction piece, although he plans to persist in nonfiction writing. Currently, he divides his time between Spain and Peru, maintaining an active role in cultural and political discourse.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Writer
- Born: March 28, 1936
- Place of Birth: Arequipa, Peru
Biography
Peru’s leading contemporary novelist and the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa is regarded as one of the creators (along with such writers as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes) of the new Latin American novel. Born in Arequipa in southern Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa was the son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta. His parents were divorced before he was born, and he was taken by his mother to live in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with her parents, who doted upon him. When he was nine, he and his mother left for Piura in northwestern Peru; however, a year later, his parents remarried, and they moved the family to Lima.
The pampered and sensitive boy found himself no longer the center of attention. At the Catholic school he attended in Lima, he was younger than most of his classmates and was consequently ridiculed. At home, his artistic activities had to be kept from his father, who regarded writing as no work for a man. For Vargas Llosa, literature became an escape and, as he later described it, a way of justifying his existence. Intending to “make a man of him,” Vargas Llosa’s father sent his son to a military academy in Lima, the Leoncio Prado. The machismo and brutality he encountered there proved highly traumatic for the young man.
This experience ended in 1952 when Vargas Llosa returned to Piura for his final year of secondary school. In Piura, he worked part-time on the newspaper La Industria and wrote a play called La huida del inca (1951; The Inca’s Escape). Returning to Lima, Vargas Llosa studied for his degree in literature at the University of San Marcos while employed as a journalist with Radio Panamericana and the newspaper La Crónica. In 1955, he married Julia Urquidi, a Bolivian; the marriage ended in divorce. In 1965, he married Patricia Llosa, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, Álvaro, Morgana, and Gonzalo. (The couple ultimately divorced in 2015 after fifty years of marriage.)
Vargas Llosa briefly visited Paris in 1958 and won a prize in a short-story competition sponsored by La Revue Française. The winning story, “El desafío” (The Challenge), was published in his first book of short stories, Los jefes (1958; The Cubs and Other Stories, 1979). The book won the Premio Leopoldo Alas award in Spain, where it was published in 1959. That same year, the author traveled to the University of Madrid on a scholarship but decided to move on to Paris without completing his doctoral dissertation. He lived there for seven years, working as a Berlitz teacher and journalist and with a French radio and television network.
In Paris, Vargas Llosa met other Latin American and French writers and intellectuals but worked and wrote in relative isolation until the publication of his first novel, La ciudad y los peros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966), which caused a sensation throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Highly experimental in style, the novel portrays an educational institution that deliberately corrupts innocence and perverts idealism in its students (indicting both the Leoncio Prado and the Peruvian military regime that it represents). The Peruvian military authorities burned a thousand copies of the book on the grounds of the Leoncio Prado and dismissed the work as the product of a demented communist mind. In Spain, however, it received the Premio de la Crítica Española. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968) appeared three years later. The title refers both to a Piura brothel and to the rainforest. The social messages—the complicity between the army and church and the horrors of human exploitation—coexist with the intense inner conflicts of the characters. Some critics disparaged the novel’s characters as one-dimensional, failing to understand that for Vargas Llosa, a novel is primarily a chronicle of action, not an inner revelation of the forces that motivate action. The book was awarded numerous prizes in Spain and Peru.
In 1966, Vargas Llosa left Paris for London, accepting an appointment as a visiting lecturer in Latin American literature at the University of London. He also traveled and lectured throughout Great Britain and Europe. He then spent a semester as a writer-in-residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.
After the publication of his third novel, Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), a monumental two-volume indictment of Peruvian life under the corrupt dictatorship of Manuel Udria (who ruled from 1948 to 1956), Vargas Llosa lectured briefly at the University of Puerto Rico. The doctoral dissertation he had begun in 1959, a study of the fiction of his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, was finally published in 1971. Two years later, a fourth novel appeared: Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978). While it once again attacked the unholy alliance of church, army, and brothel, it was written in a new farcical style. This comic vein continues in the author’s next novel, La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982), a satirical account of the discovery of a Bolivian genius in his genre: radio melodramas.
Besides being a fiction writer, Vargas Llosa has published much literary criticism. For him, writing literary criticism is a creative act, not unlike that of writing a novel or a short story, in which the critic indulges in the same arbitrariness and fantasy as the author.
Finally, Vargas Llosa took an active role in Peruvian politics, running for president in 1990. As a spokesperson for democratic centrism, he has been harshly criticized by his erstwhile colleagues on the left. Not only in speeches and journalistic pieces but also in novels such as Historia de Mayta (1984; The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1986) and La fiesta del chivo (1995; The Feast of the Goat, 2001), Vargas Llosa has cast a skeptical eye on revolutionary ideology and its real-world outcomes. Political controversy, however, has not diminished his reputation as one of the leading writers in Latin America.
In 2010 Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Academy cited Vargas Llosa’s “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
Vargas Llosa published several works of fiction, nonfiction, and drama in the 2000s and 2010s. These include the novels El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003) Travesuras de la niña mala (2005; The Bad Girl, 2006), El sueno del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012), and El héroe discreto (The Discreet Hero, 2015). Vargas Llosa continued to publish fiction and nonfiction works through the end of the 2010s and into the mid-2020s.
In 2016, the Spanish news website El Confidencial Vargas reported that Vargas Llosa and his ex-wife were named in the Panama Papers scandal, the data leak from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The two were reportedly shareholders of an offshore British Virgin Islands company for a month in 2010. There was, however, no evidence of wrongdoing on Vargas Llosa’s part. His agent says that the writer never interacted with Mossack Fonseca, and he has complied with all tax regulations in Spain and abroad. In 2021, Vargas Llosa was involved in a similar scandal with the Pandora Papers, in which he was also accused of hiding assets in offshore accounts. However, no disciplinary action was taken regarding this incident either. In 2023, Vargas Llosa announced his novel, Le dedico mi silencio (2023) would be his final work of fiction, although he stated his intent to continue writing nonfiction. In the 2020s, he became increasingly known for his outspoken political viewpoints. Vargas Llosa lives mainly in Spain, though he spends several months in Peru each year.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
La ciudad y los perros, 1962 (The Time of the Hero, 1966)
La casa verde, 1965 (The Green House, 1968)
Los cachorros, 1967 (novella The Cubs, 1979)
Conversación en la catedral, 1969 (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975)
Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1973 (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978)
La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977 (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982)
La guerra del fin del mundo, 1981 (The War of the End of the World, 1984)
La historia de Alejandro Mayta, 1984 (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1986)
¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, 1987 (Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987)
El hablador, 1987 (The Storyteller, 1989)
Elogio de la madrastra, 1988 (In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990)
Lituma en los Andes, 1993 (Death in the Andes, 1996)
Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, 1997 (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998)
La fiesta del chivo, 2000 (The Feast of the Goat, 2001)
El paraíso en la otra esquina, 2003 (The Way to Paradise, 2003)
Travesuras de la niña mala, 2006 (The Bad Girl, 2007)
El sueño del celta, 2010 (The Dream of the Celt, 2010)
El héroe discreto, 2013 (The Discreet Hero, 2015)
Cinco esquina, 2016 (The Neighborhood, 2018)
Tiempos Recios, 2019 (Harsh Times, 2021)
Le dedico mi silencio, 2023 (I Give You Silence)
Short Fiction
Los jefes, 1959 (The Cubs, and Other Stories, 1979)
Drama
La señorita de Tacna, 1981 (The Young Lady from Tacna, 1990)
Kathie y el hipopótamo, 1983 (Kathie and the Hippopotamus, 1990)
La Chunga, 1987 (English translation, La Chunga, 1990)
Three Plays, 1990
El loco de los balcones, 1993
Ojos bonitos, cuadros feos, 1996
Odiseo y Penélope, 2007
Al pie del Támesis, 2008
Las mil y una noches, 2010
Nonfiction
La novela en América Latina: Diálogo, 1968
Literatura en la revolución y revolución en literatura, 1970 (with Julio Cortázar and Oscar Collazos)
La historia secreta de una novela, 1971
Gabriel García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, 1971
El combate imaginario, 1972
García Márquez y la problemática de la novela, 1973
La novela y el problema de la expresión literaria en Peru, 1974
La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y “Madame Bovary,”1975 (The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and “Madame Bovary,”1986)
José María Arguedas: Entre sapos y halcones, 1978
La utopia arcaica, 1978
Entre Sartre y Camus, 1981
Contra viento y marea, 1964-1988, 1983-1990 (3 volumes)
A Writer’s Reality, 1991 (Myron I. Lichtblau, editor)
Fiction: The Power of Lies, 1993
Pez en el agua, 1993 (A Fish in the Water: A Memoir, 1994)
Making Waves, 1996
Cartas a un joven novelista, 1997 (Letters to a Young Novelist, 2002)
Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, 1997 (with Paul Bowles)
El lenguaje de la pasión, 2001 (The Language of Passion, 2003)
La verdad de las mentiras, 2002
La tentación de lo imposible, 2004 (The Temptation of the Impossible, 2007)
El viaje a la ficción: El mundo de Juan Carlos Onetti, 2009
Touchstones: Essays on Literature, Art, and Politics, 2011
La civilización del espectáculo, 2012 (Notes on the Death of Culture, 2015)
Sabers and Utopias, 2018
La llamada de la tribu, 2018 (The Call of the Tribe)
La mirada quieta (de Pérez Galdós), 2022 (The Quiet Gaze [of Pérez Galdós])
Bibliography
Assoc. Press. “Panama Papers: Nobel Winner Mario Vargas Llosa and Ex-Wife Named in Leak, Report Says.” The Los Angeles Times, 6 Apr. 2016, www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-panama-papers-vargas-llosa-20160406-story.html. Accessed 28 Apr. 2017.
Booker, M. Keith. Vargas Llosa Among the Postmodernists. UP of Florida, 1994.
Castro-Klarén, Sara. Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa. U of South Carolina P, 1990.
De Castro, Juan E., editor. Critical Insights: Mario Vargas Llosa. Salem Press, 2014.
Gerdes, Dick. Mario Vargas Llosa. Twayne, 1985.
Guillermoprieto, Alma. Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America. Vintage, 2007.
Jones, Sam. “Mario Vargas Llosa Says Latest Novel Will be his Last.” The Guardian, 26 Oct. 2023, www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/26/mario-vargas-llosa-latest-novel-will-be-last. Accessed 22 July 2024.
Kerr, R. A. Mario Vargas Llosa: Critical Essays on Characterization. Scripta Humanistica, 1990.
Köllmann, Sabine. A Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa. Tamesis, 2014.
Kristal, Efraín. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Vanderbilt UP, 1999.
Mochkofsky, Graciela. “The Puzzling, Increasingly Rightward Turn of Mario Vargas Llosa.” The New Yorker, 19 July 2023, www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-puzzling-increasingly-rightward-turn-of-mario-vargas-llosa. Accessed 22 July 2024.
Moses, Michael Valdez. The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. Oxford UP, 1995.
“Panama Papers: Nobel Winner Mario Vargas Llosa and Ex-wife Named in Leak, Report Says.” Los Angeles Times, 6 Apr. 2016, www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-panama-papers-vargas-llosa-20160406-story.html. Accessed 22 July 2024.
Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A., José Decórdoba, and Robert Kozak. “Peruvian Writer Wins Nobel Prize.” The Wall Street Journal, 8 Oct. 2010, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704696304575537630673507048. Accessed 28 Apr. 2017.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. “The Boom Twenty Years Later: An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa.” Interview by Raymond Leslie Williams, William Gass, and Michel Rybalka. Latin American Literary Review, vol. 15.29, 1987, pp. 201–6.
Williams, Raymond L. Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life of Writing. U of Texas P, 2014.