Mario Vargas Llosa
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
In a COVID-19 anthology, And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, in which 50 writers from around the world responded to the rampaging virus, Mario Vargas Llosa wondered why it is difficult for mankind “to accept that all of life’s beauty belong ultimately to death, and that at any moment it may all come to an end.” For the Peruvian master of letters, the end came on April 13. He was 89 years old.
Journalist, essayist, novelist, politician, controversial commentator – Llosa wore many hats, but he is best known for some of the great novels of the 20th and early 21st century The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Conversations in the Cathedral, The War of the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat. His works, totalling more than 50, chronicled the myriad social, cultural and political strands of Latin American life with rich imagery and language. His protagonists often stood up to authoritarianism, and faced defeat despite the resistance. In many of his novels, fiction was rooted in facts. For his first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), he mined his experiences at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy where he was sent by his father. The book ruffled feathers and at least a 1,000 copies were burnt by officers of the Leoncio Prado.
His attempts to marry while still a minor got a hilarious makeover in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Llosa wrote about ‘Aunt Julia’, 13 years his senior and a divorcee, whom he married – and later divorced – in his memoir, A Fish in the Water, translated by Helen Lane. When he proposed marriage to Julia, she began by “telling me just what I expected she would: that this was madness.” But in the same breath, she also said “she loved me and that if I were that mad, she was too. And that we should get married right away.”
After their marriage in 1955, he moved to Paris in 1959 to pursue a career as a language teacher, journalist and writer. After his return to Lima in the ’70s, he began teaching at universities all over the Americas. In 1990, Llosa decided to run for the presidency of Peru, leading a campaign for economic reform and a vow to end the ways of the Shining Path rebels. He lost to Alberto Fujimori and he candidly summed it up thus in his memoir: “I don’t believe I succeeded in putting across” the ideas of the Freedom Movement that took shape in painter Fernando de Szyszlo’s studio; “Peruvians did not vote for ideas in the elections, and despite all the precautions, I very often noted that I too was resorting to ham acting or an unexpected remark to milk applause from the audience.” Critics didn’t mince words about Llosa’s neo-liberal political “misadventure”, and soon he returned to teaching and writing, flitting between Barcelona, Madrid, Lima, Paris and London.
Nobel Prize in Literature
In 2010, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
Though an intensely private person, he often raked up controversy with his remarks, be it on Latin American politics or women. He famously fell out with Marquez in the mid-’70s, with a punch, before making up with the writer years later. The story goes, perhaps not apocryphal, that a lady was involved, though Llosa once said it was to do with his disenchantment with Castro’s brand of politics in Cuba. Marquez was a life-long Castro fan.
With Llosa’s passing, the last of the triumvirate of Latin America’s literary new wave that included Marquez and the Mexican great Carlos Fuentes, is gone.
Published – April 15, 2025 01:55 am IST