Mario Vargas Llosa Was the Pride of Peru and an Iconic Writer of Latin America

Great novels never actually seem to tell us anything; rather, they make us live it and share in it by virtue of their persuasive powers.

This is what Mario Vargas Llosa advises to aspiring writers in his book Letters to a Young Novelist. It is certainly true in my case. His novels, among others, have persuaded me to become passionate about Latin America. I have read most of his novels, essays and his autobiography. His characters live in my imagination. His stories keep taking me on virtual journeys across Latin America, the land of magical realism.

My favourite novel is Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The story is about an adolescent boy who falls in love with his middle-aged aunt. She tries to dissuade him saying that his infatuation would disappear later when he would discover young girls. But he persists with his declaration of love and even proposes marriage. She again discourages him, saying that such a marriage would not last given the society’s prejudice against their age combination. When he insists, she asks him, "Suppose we get married...how long do you think that we would live together happily?". The adolescent boy replies impulsively, "Two years." She jumps up in excitement, "Two years… 720 days...great...it is worthwhile to marry for two years of happiness." They run away, get married and try to come home for parental blessing. His father stands at the door with a gun and tells them to get out before he shoots them. He boy moves out with his wife and starts married life with a job as a reporter in a newspaper. It was only after finishing the novel that I found out that this was the real life story of Llosa himself.

Llosa continued his adventures even in his old age and after two wives. At the age of 78, he fell in love with a 63-year-old Spanish-Filipino socialite Isabel Preysler in Madrid. Her first husband was the famous Spanish singer Julio Iglesias. Llosa lived with her for eight years and separated from her in December 2022. Thereafter, he published a novel Le dedico mi silencio ('I Dedicate My Silence to You') in 2023 at the age of 87 and announced that would be his last novel. He died on April 14, 2025.

He has written almost every morning of his life, publishing over 60 books. Llosa has mentioned in an interview that the two books that deserved to outlive him were Conversation in the Cathedral and The War of the End of the World on which he had put in lot of extra hard work.

Most of his novels are about his native country, describing the life and society of Peruvians. A few of his novels have covered other countries. The War of the End of the World takes place in Brazil. Llosa says that this was the best among all his novels, the most ambitious project he had ever undertaken, and the book on which he worked the longest and with the most difficulty.

Another novel, Feast of the Goats, is about the Trujillo dictatorship in Dominican Republic. Harsh Times is about the overthrow of the leftist Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz by the CIA, at the behest of the United Fruit Company. The Way to Paradise originates in France and ends in Tahiti.

Llosa's novels bring out the Latin American way of life, love, sex, relationships, politics, dictatorships, revolutionaries, religion and society, realistically and magically. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. The Nobel Prize Committee cited "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". The committee also praised his writing for shaping the image of South America in contemporary literature.

Llosa is a writer's writer. In his Letters to a Young Novelist, he gives advice to aspiring writers on how to write novels. A writer, in his view, is a being seized by an insatiable appetite for creation. A writer is a rebel and a dreamer. Questioning of real life is the secret raison détre of literature, according to Llosa. He says that it is the equivalent of a reverse striptease. In A Writer's Reality, he gives a detailed account of what provoked or motivated him to write some of his novels. He describes in detail the process of his writing the novels, and the influences and inspiration behind them.

In his autobiography A Fish in the Water, written in 1993, he has given a glimpse of his evolution as a writer. When he mentioned his interest in becoming a writer, his father was against it. His father believed that "writers and poets were all drunks and faggots." So he sent the 14-year-old Llosa to a military academy to make a "proper" man out of him. He took revenge on his father by making the military academy the subject of his first novel The Time of the Hero!

But Llosa’s narratives about the unsavoury underground activities in the academy enraged the administration. They rounded up 1,000 copies of the book and set them on fire in an official ceremony. But a judge for Spain's prestigious Premio Biblioteca Breve Prize declared it "the best novel in the Spanish language in the past 30 years”. The Time of the Hero was among the first sensations of a transformative age of Latin American literature known as the Boom which included other major writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes.

Llosa had a parallel career as a journalist. He started writing for the La Cronica newspaper of Lima from the age of 14. He has written numerous columns and opinion pieces in many newspapers and magazines. He had said, “Journalism has the other side of my literary career.”

Llosa attributes his literary success to reading. According to him,

"Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

Llosa has credited French writers as the most significant literary and intellectual influence on him. The French inducted him into the Académie Française on February 9, 2023, making him the first member of the Academy although he had never written a book in French.

As an aspiring writer, he dreamed of going to France, the land of great writers who had inspired him. He did not see much scope for a writer in Peru, which, he felt, had no worthwhile publishers or great bookstores. The funny thing was that when he finally went to France, he found the French raving about Latin American literature. They were reading Borges, Cortázar, Fuentes, and Marquez. Llosa confesses, "In Paris, I began to feel like a Peruvian, a Latin American”.

Politically, Llosa started off as a Marxist. But after getting disillusioned with the failure and authoritarionism of socialism in Soviet Union and Cuba, he turned to the right. He stood in the Peruvian presidential elections in 1990 but lost to Alberto Fujimori. Llosa has remained as a strong critic of the leftist governments in Latin America.

When I was head of the Latin America division in the Ministry of External Affairs in 2004-2007, I had arranged an invitation for Llosa to visit India as the guest of Indian Council for Cultural Relations in 2006. He had accepted the invitation but could not give a date since he was busy for the next several months. Later, I tried to invite him for the Latin America conference organised by the India International Centre in February 2023 but he was not available for that either.

Ambassador R. Viswanathan is a Latin America expert. His website is here.

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