Mario Vargas Llosa passed away tonight at the age of 89 in Lima (Peru), surrounded by his family, as announced by his son Álvaro Vargas Llosa. The Hispanic-Peruvian giant is the last Spanish-speaking writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award he received in 2010.
In a statement shared on the social network X, Vargas Llosa's three children state: "His departure will sadden his relatives, friends, and readers around the world, but we hope they find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, diverse, and fruitful life , leaving behind a work that will outlive him."
According to his own account, Mario Vargas Llosa read the novel Madame Bovary six times between 1956 and 1975, a hyperbolic fact that should help understand many aspects of the Peruvian writer. At the beginning of this period, in 1956, MVLL was an anonymous student in Lima. The University of San Marcos organized an institutional event in homage to Gustave Flaubert, and the French ambassador to Peru attended the event, where he encountered a group of students who protested with shouts of "long live free Algeria." Vargas Llosa, young and linked to the Communist Party in secrecy , would have been expected to be on the side of the students, but to his own surprise, it turned out that his sympathy was with Flaubert. With Flaubert, more than with the ambassador. By 1975, at the end of his obsessive Flaubert cycle, he was already the author of Conversation in the Cathedral, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, and The Time of the Hero, already a great star of Latin American novels. But what he wanted was to write about Gustave and about Emma. In 1975, MVLL published The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary, an essay that was part academic article, part literary criticism, and part autobiographical note, and was, in itself, a wonderful text. It is good to now remember his life and work in dialogue with Flaubert.
What does The Perpetual Orgy tell us about Vargas Llosa? First: that literature has been the center of his life . Like in the life of any writer? Yes, but different, much more. Gabriel García Márquez , for example, came from journalism, popular music, oral tradition, 1940s cinema... In contrast, MVLL was, especially in the first half of his life, a monomaniac who could only explain himself through books, his own books and those of others. That's why the best pages of The Perpetual Orgy are those the narrator uses to explain his life as a reflection of Emma Bovary's: the sentimental tendency, the orphanhood, the sometimes distant character, the secret terror at the possibility of a meaningless life...
Vargas Llosa following Flaubert's path
There is a nice quirk in the career of the 2010 Nobel laureate: the penultimate book by Mario Vargas Llosa with new texts (The Quiet Gaze of Pérez Galdós, 2022) was also a literary criticism essay. He dedicated it to Benito Pérez Galdós , and it is easy to trace a thread that leads from Flaubert to Galdós and from Galdós to Vargas Llosa. It is likely that his early readers, dazzled by Conversation in the Cathedral, did not associate him with the 19th-century realism tradition but with the experimentalism of his generation, with the influence of bebop and cubism that linked him to Julio Cortázar. It may be that The Time of the Hero and The Cubs portrayed MVLL as a minimalist and expressionist novelist , more Jean Genet than Flaubert. And it is evident that Pantaleón and the Visitors suggested magical realism and that Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter could be a work of pop art...
However, time has allowed us to understand that Vargas Llosa always measured himself within the realm of old-fashioned realism , in the desire to encompass everything, from the intimate to the political, from epic adventures to psychological portraits, and in the strategy of refining forms to the limit so that the beauty of literature is a consequence and not the end.
In the story of The Perpetual Orgy, there are more keys to understanding the author: his landscape includes the University of San Marcos, a key place in his life and in novels like Conversation in the Cathedral. The political conflict emerges, and above all, there is the moral theme that has occupied his entire work and life: the conflict between an invasive and brutalizing "us" and an "I" that has to discover that it will be alone, that prefers to be alone. The Time of the Hero and the short novels that were its seed, The Leaders, and its offshoot, The Cubs, expressed that conflict through violence in a military school like the one that took care of Vargas Llosa's education, the legendary Leoncio Prado in Lima. In its courtyard, by the way, teachers and students ended up lighting a bonfire in which they burned copies of The Time of the Hero.
Conversation in the Cathedral took that conflict further: Santiago Zavala, the famous Zavalita of the phrase "at what moment did Peru get screwed up, Zavalita?", had failed in his attempt to enter the "us" of the bourgeoisie of Miraflores/San Isidro, as much as in the "us" of the communist dissidence of the University of San Marcos. His refuge was the bohemian life of journalists, but even among them, he knew he was an orphan of the group.
The orphan writer and political activist
Orphanhood has also been a vital theme for Vargas Llosa , not as a metaphor but as an experience. The Peruvian writer was born in Arequipa, the son of a broken family. His father was part of a tradition of adventurers with turbulent lives and political vocations, liberal in the 19th-century sense. When his son was 10 months old, that man abandoned his mother and disappeared for the next 11 years. Mario believed during his early childhood that his father had died , and he grew up in a more or less happy world of women, of mothers, aunts, and cousins (aunts and cousins who later appeared in his books and in his adult life). But then, his father returned, reconciled with his mother, took the family to Lima, and enrolled the boy in a succession of increasingly strict schools to counterbalance the influence of so many women.
Doesn't it all sound very Flaubert-like? Orphanhood, social descent, the discovery of authoritarianism... A white Latin American boy of Vargas Llosa's generation, with that baggage, was obviously destined for political activism. At the beginning of this text, we find him at San Marcos, linked to the Communist Party in secrecy and in opposition to the military government of Manuel Odría. "The communists at San Marcos were few but very dogmatic," Vargas Llosa recounted many years later. However, his instinct was morally individualistic and was doomed to clash with the collectivism of the left of his generation, which directly experienced the reports of Jrushev on Stalinist brutality. In 1959, when Fidel Castro arrived in Havana, he was in Paris, living on a scholarship and participating in the slow preludes of '68 and Sartrean counterculture. The Cuban Revolution was received as great news.
In 1962, the writer traveled to Havana as a journalist and was enthusiastic about the brotherhood between the people and their leaders. He returned four more times, and the idyllic image began to crack when he learned about the repression against homosexuals. Later, when he published The Time of the Hero and Venezuela, the enemy of the Revolution, awarded Vargas Llosa with the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the Havana Government gave him quite theatrical instructions on what to do with that distinction. Everything was absurd, and Vargas Llosa's writer friends in Cuba barely disguised that the atmosphere was unbearable. In 1971, after the disgrace and public humiliation of the poet Heberto Padilla, Vargas Llosa positioned himself at the forefront of opposition to Castro's dictatorship and became the black beast of Marxist loyal intellectuals in Latin America and Europe. Since then until today.
Vargas Llosa and García Márquez, antagonistic giants
Include Gabriel García Márquez? Yes, but no. The relationship between the two most important novelists in the Spanish language in the 20th century is more complex and also significant as they are explained by mutual contrast. Vargas Llosa always had the appearance of an impeccable gentleman; García Márquez, that of a rogue. Vargas Llosa had the background of a philologist who would have ended up as a university professor if the novel had not crossed his path; García Márquez was always a sentimental and tavern-like journalist. Vargas Llosa was cordial but serious in his dealings; García Márquez gave hugs, was friendly, shared indiscretions, and was not always loyal. Vargas Llosa wrote novels almost like a scientist; García Márquez was impulsive and melancholic in his relationship with literature... They met in 1967 and recognized each other as two comparable talents. Vargas Llosa wrote an essay about García Márquez,A History of Deicide. In a 2016 reissue of the work, the prologue by Joaquín Marco pointed out an interesting theory: Mario looked into Gabriel's novels because they were a kind of negative mirror in which to look at himself.
Those years were not as straightforward for Vargas Llosa as one might think when reviewing the list of consecutive successes. By around 1973, the Peruvian writer was settled in London, working as a journalist, surrounded by children and family obligations, full of doubts, convinced that he could not make a living from literature in the long run. Carmen Balcells had to appear, the entrepreneur-agent who invented the Spanish novel as a star system and who took Vargas Llosa to live in Barcelona, next door to his still friend García Márquez, to become a professional writer and an intellectual claiming his voice in public discourse.
In the second half of his career, literature was the central part of his life, but not everything. His interests increasingly shifted from novels to philosophy and politics. His instinct for individualistic nonconformity and rejection of his communist colleagues led him to delve into liberal thought. Flaubert had to share his time with Jean-François Revel, Isaiah Berlin, José Ortega y Gasset, Raymond Aron... Instead of Jean Valjean, the hero of Les Misérables that had obsessed him in his formative years, Vargas Llosa adopted Jan Valtin as a new idol, a German who spied for the USSR during World War II but later, after completing his mission, managed to escape Soviet repression and tell the world what was really happening on the other side.
In the 1980s, Vargas Llosa already presented himself as an unequivocal liberal who rejected the left/right axis to explain himself. Until the end of his life, his penultimate great battle consisted of assuring the world that he was not a right-wing man by any means, that he wanted nothing to do with conservatism as a moral system. In 1989, the writer returned to Peru, a country exhausted after a long cycle of corruption, terrorism, and statism, to be a candidate for the presidency of the Republic with a reformist project in economics and liberal in the relationship between the State and the individual. His rival was Alberto Fujimori, a Japanese-born businessman rumored to have a political program so brief and insubstantial that it fit on half a page. Fujimori's victory in the 1990 elections then seemed like the extravagance of a disorganized society. Today, it seems like the first omen of the era of populism in which we live and against which the writer fought until his last days.
How much did that frustration hurt Vargas Llosa? The memoir A Fish in the Water, in 1993, was the novelist's first book after the fiasco and was read as a noble and beautiful return home after the battle. The house of literature. In its pages, he seemed a bit less of a scientific writer, he appeared more in need than ever of being understood and loved, of finding solace in the beauty and melancholy of memories. For the first time, he was tender and self-parodic. The other great book of that time, The Feast of the Goat (2000), was its counterpart. The Feast of the Goat, set in the Dominican Republic of dictator Trujillo, was a kind of novelistic blockbuster that looked into the eyes of Vargas Llosa's foundational books. It was impossible not to relate its story to Conversation in the Cathedral.
There is more to say about The Feast of the Goat. If we were to make a political analysis of the text, we would see that its debased world is the same one that the Latin American left has denounced for decades. In its pages, an economic, racist, and hypocritical elite discovered that it depended on a grotesque and immoral infiltrator, a black man passing as white, who had the state kidnapped for their interests and was the only one to ensure the privileged position of the upper classes. Vargas Llosa's last great novel, Fierce Times (2019), participated in a similar political scheme, this time transplanted to Guatemala in the 1950s. When Vargas Llosa said that he was, under no circumstances, a right-wing man, literature was his best proof.
The Feast of the Goat arrived on the eve of Hugo Chávez's rise to power in Venezuela. Latin America, stagnant after a decade of neoliberal governments, was heading towards a new cycle of left-wing populism. Vargas Llosa, privileged with the best corners of newspapers, took the denunciation of this turn as a personal matter. He continued writing novels, increasingly filled with vigor and adventurous dreaming as the writer aged. His latest book, A Barbarian in Paris (Alfaguara, 2023), was dedicated to his intellectual sympathy for France. It is easy to link that book with the dedication of The Perpetual Orgy, that 1975 essay on Madame Bovary: "To Carlos Barral, the last French enthusiast."