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Mario Vargas Llosa

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (born 1936), novelist, critic, journalist, screenwriter, and essayist, abandoned writing at least temporarily in 1990 to run unsuccessfully for president of his country.

Like many of the characters in his fiction, (Jorge) Mario (Pedro) Vargas Llosa, internationally acclaimed Peruvian writer and recipient of almost every literary award short of the Nobel Prize, is something of a paradox. An author at home in many forms of writing, Vargas Llosa once described literature as the passion of his life. As his country's leading presidential candidate, campaigning for the center-right coalition, Fredemo, or the Democratic Front, he had come a long way from the days when he supported the Cuban revolution and was an active member in Cahuide, a small underground remnant of Peru's then-outlawed Communist Party.

He had also come a long way from his student days in the University of San Marcos when he longed to leave Peru for the heady stimulation of Europe where so many of his favorite novels at the time were set and written. His escape came in 1958 after winning a fellowship to pursue a doctoral degree in literature at the University of Madrid.

Nevertheless, although he spent two years in Madrid and several more in Paris working for French radio and television, he continued to think and write about his home-land. As evident from his life and fiction, Vargas Llosa had an intense love-hate relationship with Peru from his boyhood when he first began to write.

He was born on March 28, 1936, in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa. For the first 10 years of his life he lived in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with his mother and grandparents. He returned to Peru, however, in 1946 when his parents, who had divorced shortly before his birth, were reunited. The family settled in Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb.

By the time he was 16 he was working part-time for several Lima tabloids, covering crime stories mainly. His first book, Los Jefes, a collection of short stories, was published in 1958 when he was 22.

These years proved to be difficult for Vargas Llosa, however, since he and his father did not see eye to eye on Vargas Llosa's writing ambitions. "We were opposites; we did not respect each other, " the author said. "In Bolivia I wrote and my grandparents and mother hailed me for it. When my father discovered that I was a writer, he had the opposite reaction. The bourgeoisie of Lima then scorned literature - they considered it an alibi for idlers, an activity of the upper class."

Fearful that his son was in danger of losing his virility because of his passion for writing, Vargas Llosa's father shipped him off to Leoncio Prado, an institution that the author described as half reform school and half college, run by fanatics of military discipline. "It was the discovery of hell for me, " Vargas Llosa said. "I understood what Darwin's theory meant in the struggle for life."

Vargas Llosa's painful experiences at Leoncio Prado were the basis for his first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963). The work gained instant notoriety when Peruvian military leaders condemned it and burned one thousand copies in the courtyard of Leoncio Prado.

Praised for its stylistic and innovative craftsmanship, the novel presented from multiple points of view a story of official corruption and cruelty in a military institution. It won several major literary awards in Europe and quickly established Vargas Llosa's reputation as social critic and writer.

Vargas Llosa's next two novels were The Green House (1969), a magical realistic tale of an enchanted whore-house, and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), a 601-page narrative of the moral depravity of life in Peru during the 1950s under dictator Manuel Odria. Both books provided further variations on his themes of hypocrisy and corruption in Peruvian society and politics.

In 1973, however, Vargas Llosa's first humorous novel, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, was published. A black comedy about a naive army officer who diligently obeys his commanding officers' order to organize a corp of prostitutes to service soldiers in desolate jungle camps, the novel depicted with biting wit Vargas Llosa's continual disdain for military bureaucracy and incompetence.

Four years later his most internationally popular - and most autobiographical - novel, Aunt Julia and The Script-writer, appeared. A fictionalized version of his first marriage to his Aunt Julia, a woman ten years his senior, the novel traces the adventures of an 18-year-old character named Mario and the outlandish plots of his co-worker and friend, Pedro Camacho, a fanatical writer of soap operas who becomes increasing neurotic as he spins out daily his fantastic, convoluted tale of love, loss, and insanity.

This device of multiple-level storytelling from the point of view of widely divergent characters is a Vargas Llosa hallmark, and most critics agree that the structures of his next two overtly political novels, War at the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), are shaped by it.

In 1986 Vargas Llosa turned his hand to detective fiction and wrote the fast-paced cops and killer thriller Who Killed Palomino Molera? Although the novel lacked the thickly layered narrative scope of his other works, it clearly proved Vargas Llosa's talents for writing sordid detail and earthy, comic dialogue.

His 1987 work The Storyteller returned again to the theme of tale-telling from multiple points of view. It relates the adventures of a nameless narrator who is fascinated by the almost mystical transformation of his college friend, Saul Zurantas, a Peruvian Jew and former student of ethnology, who leaves civilization to live and tell tales among the Machiguenga tribesmen in the depths of the Amazonian rain forests. "Who is purer or happier because he's renounced his destiny?" The storyteller asks as he roams the jungle with the Machiguenga, people who must continually walk in order to fulfill their obligation to the gods and preserve the earth and the sky and the stars. "Nobody," the storyteller responds. "We'd best be what we are. The one who gives up fulfilling his own obligation so as to fulfill that of another will lose his soul."

A haunting, deeply spiritual novel, The Storyteller is entirely different in scope and tone from Vargas Llosa's later work Elogio de la Madrastra (1988), an erotic tale of sexual tension between a stepmother and stepson, described by the author as a "diversion." An English translation, In Praise of the Stepmother, was published in 1990. It was an erotic novel about a beautiful but naughty little boy. The later novels are amazing works to come from the pen of a man who temporarily, at least, abandoned his isolation as a writer to pursue an active political career. This was to fulfill what he considered his obligations toward improving the moral, social, and economic quality of life in his country.

In 1990 Vargas Llosa became the candidate for president of a center-right coalition called the Democratic Front (Fredemo). He was opposed by the candidate of the Change (Cambio) 90 Party, Alberto Fujimori. The well-known author took an early lead but gradually lost ground and in a run-off election was defeated by Fujimori.

His book about the experience, Tale of a Sacrifical Llama, released in June, 1994, offers a convincing self-portrait of a political innocent sinking under a tide of democratic absurdities. This follows his work A Fish in the Water: A Memoir which detailed "his bittersweet look at the nearly three years he spent in public life."

Vargas Llosa went back to his writing full-time after his brief affair with politics. The coveted Planeta Prize for 1994, traditionally awarded each year to a Spaniard for the best pseudonymously submitted manuscript of fiction, went to Vargas Llosa (whose application for Spanish citizenship was approved in July); his Lituma en los Andes is a story of political violence and social regression - laced with Dionysian overtones - in a contemporary Andean setting.

Vargas Llosa's latest novel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997) marked the first time any publisher had released a title in all Spanish-language markets on the same day. Sixteen of the 26 countries involved (including Spain) have Santillana companies to print and publish, although in the case of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, only Spain and Mexico printed for all the others. In the first month of publication 250, 000 copies were sold, 100, 000 of them in Latin America.

Early days

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa to a middle class family of Spanish forebears, the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta. His parents separated five months after their marriage.

Vargas Llosa spent his childhood with his mother in Cochabamba, Bolivia, obtaining his early education at the local Colegio La Salle. During the government of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, his grandfather obtained an important political post in the Peruvian city of Piura, which prompted Vargas Llosa's family to return to Peru near his grandfather and study in the Colegio Salesiano. In 1946, Vargas Llosa moved to Lima and met his father for the first time. His parents reestablished their relationship and lived in the capital during his teenage years. While in Lima he studied at the Colegio La Salle. When Vargas Llosa was 14, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima.

A year before his graduation, Vargas Llosa was already working as an amateur journalist. He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper La Industria and, at the same time, where the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, La Huida del Inca (The Fleeing of the Inca), took place.

During the government of Manuel A. Odría, Vargas Llosa entered Lima's National University of San Marcos in 1953 to study literature. At the young age of 19, he married Julia Urquidi, his uncle's sister-in-law, who was 13 years his senior. The relationship did not last long, however, and in 1959 he left to Spain thanks to a Javier Prado scholarship, and did post-graduate studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1971.

Rise to success

Vargas Llosa first came to attention as a writer with La ciudad y los perros (1962, translated into English as The Time of The Hero literal translation: 'The City & the Dogs', 1963), based on his teenage experiences at Leoncio Prado.

The work met with wide acclaim, and its author was hailed as one of the main exponents of the Latin American literary boom, alongside Paraguay's Augusto Roa Bastos, Argentina's Julio Cortázar, Mexico's Carlos Fuentes and Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez. The novel shows influence of the existentialist works of Jean-Paul Sartre, and quotes a dialogue from one of his novels at the beginning of each of its two parts. It also demonstrated what would become Vargas Llosa's trademark technique, the use of alternating dialogue to portray realities that are separated by space and time, and the use of verb tense to move his narrative back and forth in time; as well as establishing what would become the main theme of his narrative: the fight of the individual in search of freedom in an oppressive reality.

Vargas Llosa followed La ciudad y los perros with La casa verde (The Green House, 1966), a novel that shows the considerable influence that William Faulkner had on the budding writer. The novel deals with a brothel called the Green House, and how its quasi-mythical presence affects the lives of the characters. The main plot follows Bonifacia, a girl who is about to receive the vows of the church, and the transformation that will lead her to become la Selvatica, the best known prostitute of the Green House. The novel confirmed Vargas Llosa in his position as an important voice of Latin American narrative, and went on to win the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967, out-voting works by the veteran Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti and by Gabriel García Márquez.

Vargas Llosa's third novel completes what many critics consider to be his most valuable narrative cycle. Published in a four-volume edition, Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) was Vargas Llosa's first attempt at what he calls a "total novel," that is, the depiction of all the levels of a society through fictional narrative. The novel is a deconstruction of Peru under the dictatorship of Odría in the 1950s, and deals with the lives of characters from the different social strata of the country. The ambitious narrative is built around two axes, the stories of Santiago Zavala and Ambrosio respectively; one the son of a minister, the other his chauffeur. A random meeting at a dog pound leads to a rivetting conversation between the two at a nearby bar known as the Cathedral (hence the title). In the course of the encounter Zavala tries to find the truth about his father's role in the murder of a notorious figure of the Peruvian underworld (this is revealed to the reader towards the end of the novel), shedding light on the workings of a dictatorship along the way. The novel makes sophisticated use of techniques of alternating narrative, as the conversation in the bar is intercut with scenes from the past.

Vargas Llosa followed this serious novel with the shorter and much more comic Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1972), which uses a series of vignettes of dialogues and documents to narrate the establishment by the Peruvian armed forces of a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas. Pantaleón y las Visitadoras was made into a movie on two separate occasions. It was filmed in the Dominican Republic in 1975 using a screenplay written by Vargas Llosa and Vargas Llosa co-directed the movie with José María Gutiérrez Santos. At the time the movie was first released, Peru was under a military government and the film was not allowed to open in Peru because the subject matter was considered offensive to the military. The movie was remade in 1999 and released in 2000 using a new screenplay.

Later works

In 1977 Vargas Llosa published La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter), based in part on his first marriage. Julia Urquidi, his ex-wife, later wrote a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say) in which she gave her own version of their relationship. Vargas Llosa's novel was later adapted as a Hollywood feature film, Tune in Tomorrow.

La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), published in 1981, is a fictional recreation (inspired by Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões) of the War of Canudos, an incident in 19th-century Brazil in which an armed millenarian cult held off a siege by the national army for a number of months.

Vargas Llosa's most recent novel, Travesuras de la niña mala (2006), relates the decades-long obsession of its narrator, a Peruvian expatriate, with a woman with whom he first fell in love when both were teenagers.

Vargas Llosa's novels include many different literary genres, including comedy (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service), murder mystery (Who Killed Palomino Molero?), historical novel (The War of the End of the World), dictator novel (The Feast of the Goat), and erotic (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto). They are often based on historical events or personal experiences. His writing style often includes intricate changes in time and narrator, similar to that of American novelist William Faulkner, whom Vargas Llosa acknowledges as a literary influence in his account of the novelist's craft A Writer's Reality (La Verdad de las Mentiras) (1991). Vargas Llosa's first novels were set in Peru, but he has broadened his setting over time. Later novels included some set elsewhere in Latin America, such as Brazil (The War of the End of the World (1981)) and the Dominican Republic (Feast of the Goat (2000)). One of his more recent novels (The Way to Paradise (2003)) is set largely in France and Tahiti.

Literary criticism

Vargas Llosa has written a book-length study of Gabriel García Márquez, a onetime friend with whom he subsequently parted ways. After the book, entitled García Márquez: historia de un deicidido, was published in 1971 in an edition of 20,000 copies, the initial edition quickly sold out, but despite great demand (and at least one pirated edition) Vargas Llosa refused to allow its republication for many years. The study was eventually included in a volume of his collected works in 2006. It has not been translated into English. He has also written book-length studies of Flaubert and of the Valencian writer Joanot Martorell. Vargas Llosa's discussion of his own novels is contained in A Writer's Reality (1991).

Political involvement

Vargas Llosa 1990 election poster

In common with many fellow Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, but he eventually became disenchanted with what he saw as the totalitarian policies of the Cuban government, and would later move considerably to the right.

During the 1980s, Vargas Llosa became increasingly politically active in his native country, and became known for liberal and pro-market views. In 1987, when president Alan Garcia attempted to nationalize the banking system, he formed a political movement called Libertad that opposed it. He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the center-right FREDEMO coalition, proposing a drastic austerity program. During the campaign, his opponents read racy passages of his works over the radio in an apparent attempt to shock voters.^{[citation needed]} Although he won the first round with 34% of the vote,^{[citation needed]} Vargas Llosa was defeated by a then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori, in the subsequent run-off. His account of his run for the presidency was subsequently included in a memoir, published in an English-language translation (by Helen Lane) as A Fish in the Water.

On his most recent visit to Peru before the 2006 presidential elections, Vargas Llosa campaigned in favor of conservative candidate Lourdes Flores, saying she respected democracy and promised "a moderate" program for the country. In contrast, he warned that if nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala were to win it would be a "great misfortune" since he "will push Peru toward the same catastrophic route that Chávez is pushing his country."^{[citation needed]} Although Humala had led a rebellion against Fujimori in 2000, Vargas Llosa suggested that Humala was a carbon copy of Fujimori. He asked: "How it is possible that at least a third of Peruvians want a return to dictatorship, authoritarianism, a subjugated press, judicial manipulation, impunity and the systematic abuse of human rights?"^{[citation needed]} As the presidential race during the second round drew to an end and polls showed Humala trailing former president Garcia, Vargas Llosa tepidly endorsed his former enemy Garcia as "the lesser of two evils."^{[citation needed]}

Family

His cousin Luis Llosa is a Peruvian film director, who filmed an adaptation of Vargas Llosa's novel The Feast of the Goat.

Vargas Llosa and Julia Urquidi were divorced in 1964. In 1965 Vargas Llosa married his first cousin Patricia Llosa, with whom he has three children: Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a writer and editor; Gonzalo, a senior policy advisor for UNHCR; and Morgana, a photographer.

Works

Fiction

The Time of the Hero (1963)
The Green House (1966)
The Cubs and Other Stories (1967)
Conversation in the Cathedral (1969)
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)
The War of the End of the World (1981)
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984)
Who Killed Palomino Molero? (1986)
The Storyteller (1987) (not to be confused with the American television series of the same name)
In Praise of the Stepmother (1988)
Death in the Andes (1993)
Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997)
The Feast of the Goat (2000)
The Way to Paradise (2003)
Mischiefs of the Bad Girl (2006)

Non-fiction

Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanch
García Márquez: Story of a Deicide
The Perpetual Orgy
A Fish in the Water (1993)
Making Waves
The Language of Passion
Letters to a Young Novelist
A Writer's Reality (1991)
La tentación de lo imposible – The Temptation of the Impossible (2004)
Los Toros - Introduction (excerpt from the speech "El Pregón de Sevilla") (2007)

External links

[1]A bilingual interview with Vargas Llosa in Literal
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue9/younourishwithhate.htm/ Mario Vargas Llosa in Spring 2007 issue of TATE ETC. magazine
Mi experiencia en la literatura Spanish. New Media, Francisco Marroquín University
10 November 2000 speech in Washington DC on the future of liberty in Latin America
Global Village or Global Pillage? An article by Vargas Llosa
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18532/article_detail.asp Confessions of an Old-Fashioned Liberal by Mario Vargas Llosa
Times UK article on his feud with García Márquez

The work of Mario Vargas Llosa
Novels The Time of the Hero, The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral, Captain Pandoja and the Special Service, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of The End of the World, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, The Storyteller, In Praise of The Stepmother, Death in the Andes, The Feast of the Goat, The Way to Paradise, Mischiefs of the Bad Girl
Short stories: The Cubs and other Stories, Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
Non-fiction Carta de batalla por Tirant Lo Blanc, García Márquez: Story of a deicide, The Perpetual Orgy, A Fish in the Water, Making Waves, The Language of Passion, Letters to a Young Novelist, A Writer's reality, La tentación de lo imposible

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Mario Vargas Llosa
The leading novelist in his youth
Birth name	Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa
Born	March 28 1936 (1936--) (age 71) Arequipa - Peru
Nationality	Peruvian and Spanish
Field	Writer, journalist, poet, and politician
Patrons	Pancho Villa, Manuel Estrada Cabrera
Awards	Premio Cervantes among many more; he was nominated for the Nobel prize

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