Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has died this Sunday in Lima, his son Álvaro reported. Born in Arequipa on March 28, 1936, the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature had just turned 89. Author of fundamental works such as conversation in the Cathedral, the city and the dogs or the Chivo party, was one of the most important writers of contemporary literature in any language. Novelist, essayist, polemicist, articulist and academic, and an influential intellectual to the old way, that is, prior to social networks.
In October 2023 he published his latest novel, in which he announced his goodbye to fiction. Two months later he also said goodbye to journalistic columnism, that is, of his touchstone, the gallery that since 1990 published biweekly in the country. These articles were the demonstration of their inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and their eagerness to intervene in all social and political debates today. In them, as in some of their essays, that progressive Vargas Llosa appeared in the moral, but neoliberal in the economic that baffled (and even irritated) to the thousands
It was his conservative political commitment to invoked for years to explain the delay in receiving an award for which he seemed predestined: in 2010, just when he had disappeared from the bets – he was a guest professor in Princeton – to announce that he had finally awarded the most coveted medal of universal letters. The reason? “Because of its cartography of the structures of power and their sharp images of resistance, rebellion and defeat of the individual.” He was 74 years old and had just sent a novel about wild colonialism associated with the exploitation of rubber: Celta’s dream.
Since he debuted with 23 years with a volume of stories – the bosses (1959) -, he had not stopped writing and publishing. However, to find one of his great fiction works at the time of the Nobel, he had to go back a decade, in a way, that novel based on real events about the tyranny of the Dominican Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was his late contribution to the informal conjure of Latin American authors to portray the dictatorships of the subcontinent. Gabriel García Márquez (the Autumn of the Patriarch), Miguel Ángel Asturias (the President) or Augusto Rosa Bastos (I, the Supreme) preceded him in the task.
—The famous boom – of Latin American literature since in 1963, I feel just a twenty -year -old, won with the city another prize, the brief library, convened by the Barcelona publishing house Seix Barral. Inspiration came from his own past: adolescence at the Leoncio Prado Military College of Lima, a sordid place where his father admitted to get him out of the meek orbit of the maternal family.
In fact, the reappearance of his choleric parent, which he believed dead for years, was the traumatic end of a placid childhood after Cochabamba (Bolivia) and in Piura, in northern Peru. Not surprisingly, it was the time of the paternal resurrection chosen by the writer for. He published them in 1993, three years after Alberto Fujimori defeated him in the presidential elections. That political frustration occupies the even chapters of a long story that is completed in the odds with the author’s literary and sentimental education: since in 1957 he travels to Paris for the first time thanks to a stories contest until the day he goes to a kennel to rescue the batuque, a “chucho” they had given him. There he contemplated a scene of brutality against the animals from which he had to recover in the first “caffetucho” he found: the cathedral. whose first phrase instantly entered to be part of the history of literature: “At what time did Peru fuck?”
That novel was the first to write as a professional writer thanks to a decisive figure. Installed in London since 1966, the novelist and his family lived with the fair thanks to the literature classes he taught in Queen Mary College when the literary agent offered him a salary on account of the rights of that masterpiece in progress. With a condition: that was installed in Barcelona and dedicated exclusively to writing. It was what he did between 1970 and 1974, a period in which he agreed on which he wrote a reference study – history of a deicide – and to which he joined a close friendship that ended up broken by an episode without clarifying that he ended with Vargas Llosa putting a purple eye to his colleague.
Lima, Madrid, Paris, London and Barcelona form the vital cartography of a man who was going like a glove the label of universal writer. He drank from all sources and participated in all debates. If his literary teacher was Flaubert -from which he learned that where the talent does not arrive, the effort comes -, over time he would joke with his youth nickname -the brave pan -but for years he blindly believed in the writer’s commitment. Death has truncated his latest literary project: an essay on his work.
In 1971, following the Padilla case, he broke with the Cuban revolution – another of his fervent – and with communism. From then on, their influences blew from the opposite shore: a political liberalism forged by thinkers such as Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin or Raymond Aron that in the economic one translated into the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher, visible head of the conservative revolution that triumphed in the eighties of the twentieth century and had its iconic moment in the fall of the Berlin wall.
With the underground irony that characterized him, that in the house of his childhood the definition of Liberal was given by his grandmother Carmen: “Someone who does not go to Mass and who divorces.” In one of his last television interviews, recorded for the program of his friend Mercedes Milá, that the family was for him a symbol of order, and that his was always “the adventure”. Indeed, his sentimental life was crossed by great passions that developed against all bourgeois conventions: with his aunt Julia, 10 years older than him; with his cousin Patricia, mother of her three children (Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana); Or with Isabel Preysler, which she joined in 2015, when she was 79 years old. They broke with a certain scandal in December 2022.
In possession of all possible awards (from Cervantes al Nobel, passing through the Princess of Asturias, Romulo Gallegos and even the planet), Mario Vargas Llosa was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy (armchair L), corporation in which he entered in 1996 with a speech about Azorín to which Camilo José Cela replied. In November 2021 it also became despite not having written a single line in the language of Molière. “I secretly aspired to be a French writer,” he said in February 2023 at the beginning of his speech of admission to a ceremony to which King Juan Carlos came.
Accustomed from a young age to accumulate distinctions, he always said that his great goal was not to become a statue. In 2019, when it seemed that he would no longer write anything at the height of his great novels, he published the pride – in 1954 and with false accusations of radical communism – the Tibly Social Democratic Government of Jacobo Affenz in Guatemala. The work closes with a paragraph in which Vargas Llosa, a staunch anti -Castro, showed that before Fidel Castro’s enemy was a friend of the truth. to ally with the Soviet Union to “shield against the pressures, boycots and possible aggressions of the United States.” In his opinion, “another could have been the story of Cuba” if the US had previously accepted the “modernization and democratization” of Guatemala rehearsed by Affenz. That recognition was one of the last intellectual lessons of an undisputed writer who loved to discuss. And that always faced the ideological debate without a trace of cynicism.
For him, writing and politics were always two sides of the same currency: that of individual freedom. At the expense of social justice. That is why remembering that “the lies of literature become truths through us, readers transformed, contaminated with desires and, because of fiction, in permanent question with the mediocre reality.” Reading, he added, inoculate rebellion in the human spirit: “That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading and writing, the most effective way we have found to relieve our perishable condition, to defeat the woodwood of time and make the impossible possible.” And where appropriate, something else: be immortal for your readers.
