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Mario Vargas Llosa

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Mario Vargas Llosa (full name: Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa) (born in Arequipa, Peru on March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer and politician who is one of Latin America's leading novelists and essayists. He was hailed in the 1960s as one of the main exponents of the Latin American literary boom, and continues to write prolifically. He is considered to have more of a continued international impact and world-wide audience than any other writer from the Latin American Boom.

Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero), La casa verde (The Green House), and the monumental Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral). He referred to the last of these as a "total novel", because its narrative depicted all levels of society. His novels span many literary genres, including comedy, murder mystery, history, and political thriller. Several, such as Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor, have been adapted as feature films (the latter as Tune in Tomorrow).

Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career. The most notable aspect of his political engagement has been his movement from the political left towards the right. He initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, but later became disenchanted. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, as the center-right FREDEMO coalition candidate, advocating neoliberal reforms, and has subsequently supported conservative moderates.

Vargas Llosa now lives in Madrid and London and recently took up Spanish citizenship. He only spends about 3 months of the year in his native Peru He has been twice married, and his children include the writer Álvaro Vargas Llosa.

Early life

Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in the Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa to a middle class family of Spanish descent, the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta. His parents had already divorced when he was born, and he would not meet his father until he was ten years old. There are many speculations on why Mario's parent's separated which include Ernesto Vargas's social inferiority to the Llosa family and Dora Llosa's mistreatment and suppression by Mario's father. When Dora Llosa returns pregnant to Arequipa in 1935, Ernesto Vargas ignored her presence and files for divorce. A few months after Mario Vargas Llosa is born, Ernesto reveals his romance with a german woman when Enrique Vargas is born, followed by Ernesto, Mario's half brothers.

After Vargas Llosa's parents divorced, Mario and his mother moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia when he was a year old. He spent his childhood with his maternal family, the Llosas, sustained by his grandfather who managed a cotton farm. While growing up in Cochabamba, his mother and her family told him that his father had died, not that his parents had separated. Vargas Llosa obtained his early education at the local Colegio La Salle. During the government of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, his paternal grandfather obtained an important political post in the Peruvian coastal city of Piura, which prompted Vargas Llosa and his mother 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 Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb, 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 for various local newspapers. 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, took place.

During the government of Manuel A. Odría in 1953, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima's National University of San Marcos to study law and literature. In 1955, at the age of 19, he married Julia Urquidi, his uncle's sister-in-law; he was 13 years younger than her. In 1959, together he and his wife left to Spain thanks to a Javier Prado scholarship, and pursued his post-graduate studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, from which he received a Ph.D. in and literature. The marriage, however did not last very long and in 1964 Vargas Llosa and Urqudi divorced.

In 1959 Vargas Llosa moved to France where he worked as a Spanish teacher, journalist for Agence-France-Presse, and broadcaster for Radio Télévision Française. He made this move because he felt he was unable to make a living as a serious writer in Peru.

Vargas Llosa first came to attention as a writer in 1963 with La Ciudad y los Perros (English translation The Time of the Hero, 1966), based on his teenage experiences at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy.

Rise to success

La ciudad y los perros met with wide acclaim, and its author was hailed as one of the main exponents of the Latin American literary boom, alongside writers such as 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 manifested 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.

He followed La Ciudad y Los Perros by writing 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 portrayal 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 riveting 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 inter-cut 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, through a series of vignettes of dialogues and documents, follows the establishment by the Peruvian armed forces of a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas.

Later works

In 1977 Vargas Llosa published La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and 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 has been adapted into 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 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.

Genre and Style

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), political thriller (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 Road 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 deicidio, 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

Like many fellow Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. However, he eventually became disenchanted with the policies of the Cuban government and moved considerably to the right.

During the 1980s, Vargas Llosa became increasingly politically active in his native country, and became known for his staunch neoliberal views. In 1987, he helped form and soon became leader of the Movimiento Libertad. The following year his party entered into a coalition with the parties of Peru's two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaunde Terry (AP) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (PPC), to form the tripartite coalition known as Frente Democratico (FREDEMO). He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the center-right FREDEMO coalition. He proposed a drastic austerity program that frightened most of the country's poor. This program emphasized the need for privatization, a market economy, free trade, and most importantly, the dissemination of private property. During the campaign, his opponents read racy passages of his works over the radio in an apparent attempt to shock voters. Although he won the first round with 34% of the vote, 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." 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?" As the presidential race during the second round drew to an end and polls showed Humala trailing former president Alan Garcia, Vargas Llosa tepidly endorsed Garcia as "the lesser of two evils."

Many Spanish-language publications have begun to describe Vargas Llosa as "Spanish-Peruvian" since he received citizenship in Spain in 1993. Since 1996 he has increasingly made Spain his home. In 1994 he was elected a member of the Spanish Royal Academy (Real Academia Española).

Family

His cousin Luis Llosa is a Peruvian film director, who has filmed an adaptation of Vargas Llosa's novel The Feast of the Goat. After his divorce from Julia Urquidi, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, in 1965. Together they have three children: Álvaro Vargas Llosa, a writer and editor; Gonzalo, a businessman; and Morgana, a photographer. Gabriel Garcia Marquez became the godfather of one of his oldest son.

In January 2008, the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio reported that Vargas Llosa had recently been hospitalized with a cardiac condition. He left the hospital on January 19, with little public comment on his hospitalization, while Peruvian news sources reported that he was out of danger and fully recovered.

Works

Fiction

Non-fiction

Awards

  • 1959 – Premio Leopoldo Alas
  • 1962 – Premio Biblioteca Breve
  • 1963 – Premio de la Crítica Española, National Book Critics Award
  • 1966 – National Book Critics Award
  • 1967 – Nacional de Novela del Perú, Premio de la Crítica Española, Premio Internacional de Literatura Rómulo Gallegos
  • 1982 – Premio del Instituto Italo Latinoamericano
  • 1985 – Premio Ritz París Hemingway
  • 1986 – Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras
  • 1988 – Premio Libertad
  • 1989 – Premio Scanno
  • 1990 – Premio Castiglione
  • 1993 – Premio Planeta
  • 1994 – Premio Literario Arzobispo San Clemente
  • 1995 – Premio Jerusalén
  • 1996 – Premio de la Paz
  • 1997 – Premio Mariano de Cavia

Notes

References

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External links



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