Mario Vargas

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa (born 28 March 1936), more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa (, ), is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and former politician, who also holds Spanish citizenship. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He also won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award, the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes International Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit.

Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as ''The Time of the Hero'' (''La ciudad y los perros'', literally ''The City and the Dogs'', 1963/1966), ''The Green House'' (''La casa verde'', 1965/1968), and the monumental ''Conversation in the Cathedral'' (''Conversación en la catedral'', 1969/1975). He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. Several, such as ''Captain Pantoja and the Special Service'' (1973/1978) and ''Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'' (1977/1982), have been adapted as feature films.

Many of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa has made many criticisms of nationalism in different parts of the world. Kordić 2005, pp. 265–268. Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism, to a sometimes playful postmodernism.

Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and now identifies as a liberal. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 with the center-right '' Frente Democrático'' coalition, advocating classical liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori. He is the person who, in 1990, "coined the phrase that circled the globe",''Terra.'' 7 October 2010
Vargas Llosa a 20 años de "México es una dictadura perfecta"
(Vargas Llosa, 20 years after "Mexico is a perfect dictatorship"). declaring on Mexican television, "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship", a statement that became an adage during the following decade.

Vargas Llosa is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.

Early life and family

Mario Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family on 28 March 1936, in the southern Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta (the former a radio operator in an aviation company, the latter the daughter of an old criollo family), who separated a few months before his birth. Shortly after Mario's birth, his father revealed that he was having an affair with a German woman; consequently, Mario has two younger half-brothers: Enrique and Ernesto Vargas.

Vargas Llosa lived with his maternal family in Arequipa until a year after his parents' divorce, when his maternal grandfather was named honorary consul for Peru in Bolivia. With his mother and her family, Vargas Llosa then moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he spent the early years of his childhood. His maternal family, the Llosas, were sustained by his grandfather, who managed a cotton farm. As a child, Vargas Llosa was led to believe that his father had died—his mother and her family did not want to explain that his parents had separated. During the government of Peruvian President José Bustamante y Rivero, Vargas Llosa's maternal grandfather obtained a diplomatic post in the northern Peruvian coastal city of Piura and the entire family returned to Peru. While in Piura, Vargas Llosa attended elementary school at the religious academy ''Colegio Salesiano''. In 1946, at the age of ten, he moved to Lima and met his father for the first time. His parents re-established 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'', a Christian middle school, from 1947 to 1949.

When Vargas Llosa was fourteen, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima. At the age of 16, before his graduation, Vargas Llosa began working as an amateur journalist for local newspapers. He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper, ''La Industria'', and witnessed the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, ''La huida del Inca''.

In 1953, during the government of Manuel A. Odría, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima's National University of San Marcos, to study law and literature. He married Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle's sister-in-law, in 1955 at the age of 19; she was 10 years older. Vargas Llosa began his literary career in earnest in 1957 with the publication of his first short stories, "The Leaders" ("Los jefes") and "The Grandfather" ("El abuelo"), while working for two Peruvian newspapers. Upon his graduation from the National University of San Marcos in 1958, he received a scholarship to study at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. In 1960, after his scholarship in Madrid had expired, Vargas Llosa moved to France under the impression that he would receive a scholarship to study there; however, upon arriving in Paris, he learned that his scholarship request was denied. Despite Mario and Julia's unexpected financial status, the couple decided to remain in Paris where he began to write prolifically —even as a ghostwriter. Their marriage lasted only a few more years, ending in divorce in 1964. A year later, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children: Álvaro Vargas Llosa (born 1966), a writer and editor; Gonzalo (born 1967), an international civil servant; and Morgana (born 1974), a photographer.

Writing career

Beginning and first major works

Vargas Llosa's first novel, ''The Time of the Hero'' (''La ciudad y los perros''), was published in 1963. The book is set among a community of cadets in a Lima military school, and the plot is based on the author's own experiences at Lima's Leoncio Prado Military Academy. This early piece gained wide public attention and immediate success. Its vitality and adept use of sophisticated literary techniques immediately impressed critics, and it won the ''Premio de la Crítica Española'' award. Nevertheless, its sharp criticism of the Peruvian military establishment led to controversy in Peru. Several Peruvian generals attacked the novel, claiming that it was the work of a "degenerate mind" and stating that Vargas Llosa was "paid by Ecuador" to undermine the prestige of the Peruvian Army.

In 1965, Vargas Llosa published his second novel, ''The Green House'' (''La casa verde''), about 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 her transformation into ''la Selvatica'', the best-known prostitute of "The Green House". The novel was immediately acclaimed, confirming Vargas Llosa as an important voice of Latin American narrative. ''The Green House'' won the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967, contending with works by veteran Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti and by Gabriel García Márquez. This novel alone accumulated enough awards to place the author among the leading figures of the Latin American Boom. Some critics still consider ''The Green House'' to be Vargas Llosa's finest and most important achievement. Indeed, Latin American literary critic Gerald Martin suggests that ''The Green House'' is "one of the greatest novels to have emerged from Latin America".

Vargas Llosa's third novel, ''Conversation in the Cathedral'' (''Conversación en la catedral''), was published in 1969, when he was 33. This ambitious narrative is the story of Santiago Zavala, the son of a government minister, and Ambrosio, his chauffeur. A random meeting at a dog pound leads the pair to a riveting conversation at a nearby bar known as "The Cathedral". During the encounter, Zavala searches for the truth about his father's role in the murder of a notorious Peruvian underworld figure, shedding light on the workings of a dictatorship along the way. Unfortunately for Zavala, his quest results in a dead end with no answers and no sign of a better future. The novel attacks the dictatorial government of Odría by showing how a dictatorship controls and destroys lives. The persistent theme of hopelessness makes ''Conversation in the Cathedral'' Vargas Llosa's most bitter novel.

He lectured on Spanish American Literature at King's College London from 1969 to 1970.

1970s and the "discovery of humor"

In 1971, Vargas Llosa published ''García Márquez: Story of a Deicide'' (''García Márquez: historia de un deicidio''), which was his doctoral thesis for the Complutense University of Madrid. Although Vargas Llosa wrote this book-length study about his then friend, the Colombian Nobel laureate writer Gabriel García Márquez, they did not speak to each other again. In 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face in Mexico City at the ''Palacio de Bellas Artes'', ending the friendship. Neither writer had publicly stated the underlying reasons for the quarrel. A photograph of García Márquez sporting a black eye was published in 2007, reigniting public interest in the feud. Despite the decades of silence, in 2007, Vargas Llosa agreed to allow part of his book to be used as the introduction to a 40th-anniversary edition of García Márquez's '' One Hundred Years of Solitude'', which was re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America that year. ''Historia de un Deicidio'' was also reissued in that year, as part of Vargas Llosa's complete works.

Following the monumental work ''Conversation in the Cathedral'', Vargas Llosa's output shifted away from more serious themes such as politics and problems with society. Latin American literary scholar Raymond L. Williams describes this phase in his writing career as "the discovery of humor".Qtd. in His first attempt at a satirical novel was ''Captain Pantoja and the Special Service'' (''Pantaleón y las visitadoras''), published in 1973. This short, comic novel offers vignettes of dialogues and documents about the Peruvian armed forces and a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas. These plot elements are similar to Vargas Llosa's earlier novel ''The Green House'', but in a different form. ''Captain Pantoja and the Special Service'' is, therefore, essentially a parody of both ''The Green House'' and the literary approach that novel represents. Vargas Llosa's motivation to write the novel came from actually witnessing prostitutes being hired by the Peruvian Army and brought to serve soldiers in the jungle.

From 1974 to 1987, Vargas Llosa focused on his writing, but also took the time to pursue other endeavors. In 1975, he co-directed an unsuccessful motion-picture adaptation of his novel, ''Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service''. In 1976 he was elected President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers and oldest human rights organisation, a position he held until 1979. During this time, Vargas Llosa constantly traveled to speak at conferences organized by international institutions such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge, where he was Simón Bolívar Professor and an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College in 1977–78.

In 1977, Vargas Llosa was elected as a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language, a membership he still holds today. That year, he also published ''Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'' (''La tía Julia y el escribidor''), based in part on his marriage to his first wife, Julia Urquidi, to whom he dedicated the novel. She later wrote a memoir, ''Lo que Varguitas no dijo'' (''What Little Vargas Didn't Say''), in which she gives her personal account of their relationship. She states that Vargas Llosa's account exaggerates many negative points in their courtship and marriage while minimizing her role of assisting his literary career. ''Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'' is considered one of the most striking examples of how the language and imagery of popular culture can be used in literature. The novel was adapted in 1990 into a Hollywood feature film, ''Tune in Tomorrow''.

Later novels

Vargas Llosa's fourth major novel, ''The War of the End of the World'' (''La guerra del fin del mundo''), was published in 1981 and was his first attempt at a historical novel. This work initiated a radical change in Vargas Llosa's style towards themes such as messianism and irrational human behaviour. It recreates 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 months. As in Vargas Llosa's earliest work, this novel carries a sober and serious theme, and its tone is dark. Vargas Llosa's bold exploration of humanity's propensity to idealize violence, and his account of a man-made catastrophe brought on by fanaticism on all sides, earned the novel substantial recognition.
Because of the book's ambition and execution, critics have argued that this is one of Vargas Llosa's greatest literary pieces.
Even though the novel has been acclaimed in Brazil, it was initially poorly received because a foreigner was writing about a Brazilian theme. The book was also criticized as revolutionary and anti-socialist. Vargas Llosa says that this book is his favorite and was his most difficult accomplishment.

After completing ''The War of the End of the World'', Vargas Llosa began to write novels that were significantly shorter than many of his earlier books. In 1983, he finished ''The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta'' (''Historia de Mayta'', 1984). The novel focuses on a leftist insurrection that took place on 29 May 1962, in the Andean city of Jauja. Later the same year, during the Sendero Luminoso uprising, Vargas Llosa was asked by the Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde Terry to join the Investigatory Commission, a task force to inquire into the massacre of eight journalists at the hands of the villagers of Uchuraccay. The commission's main purpose was to investigate the murders in order to provide information regarding the incident to the public. Following his involvement with the Investigatory Commission, Vargas Llosa published a series of articles to defend his position in the affair. In 1986, he completed his next novel, ''Who Killed Palomino Molero'' (''¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?''), which he began writing shortly after the end of the Uchuraccay investigation. Though the plot of this mystery novel is similar to the tragic events at Uchuraccay, literary critic Roy Boland points out that it was not an attempt to reconstruct the murders, but rather a "literary exorcism" of Vargas Llosa's own experiences during the commission. The experience also inspired one of Vargas Llosa's later novels, ''Death in the Andes'' (''Lituma en los Andes''), originally published in 1993 in Barcelona.

It was almost 20 years before Vargas Llosa wrote another major work: '' The Feast of the Goat'' (''La fiesta del chivo''), a political thriller, was published in 2000 (and in English in 2001). According to Williams, it is Vargas Llosa's most complete and most ambitious novel since ''The War of the End of the World''. Critic Sabine Koellmann sees it in the line of his earlier novels such as "Conversación en la catedral" depicting the effects of authoritarianism, violence and the abuse of power on the individual.. Based on the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who governed the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, the novel has three main strands: one concerns Urania Cabral, the daughter of a former politician and Trujillo loyalist, who returns for the first time since leaving the Dominican Republic after Trujillo's assassination 30 years earlier; the second concentrates on the assassination itself, the conspirators who carry it out, and its consequences; and the third and final strand deals with Trujillo himself in scenes from the end of his regime. The book quickly received positive reviews in Spain and Latin America, and has had a significant impact in Latin America, being regarded as one of Vargas Llosa's best works.

In 1995, he wrote and published a children's book called ''Hitos y Mitos Literarios'' ("The Milestones and the Stories of Greatest Literary Works"), illustrated by Willi Glasauer. The book includes fun facts, trivia, and information accompanied by photos and Willi Glasauer's illustrations of the likes of '' Brave New World'' by Aldous Huxley, '' Manhattan Transfer'' by John Dos Passos, '' The Stranger'' by Albert Camus, ''Lolita'' by Vladimir Nabokov, '' One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, '' Death in Venice'' by Thomas Mann, '' The Great Gatsby'' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, ''Herzog'' by Saul Bellow, '' East of Eden'' by John Steinbeck, '' Steppenwolf'' by Hermann Hesse, and '' A Moveable Feast'' by Ernest Hemingway.

In 2003 he wrote '' The Way to Paradise'' in which he studies Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin.

In 2006, Vargas Llosa wrote ''The Bad Girl'' (''Travesuras de la niña mala''), which journalist Kathryn Harrison argues is a rewrite (rather than simply a recycling) of Gustave Flaubert's '' Madame Bovary'' (1856). In Vargas Llosa's version, the plot relates the decades-long obsession of its narrator, a Peruvian expatriate in Paris, with a woman with whom he first fell in love when both were teenagers.

In 2019 he published the novel ''Tiempos recios'' (''Fierce times'' ), about the 1954 coup in Guatemala.

Political career

Turn to liberalism

Like many other Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. He studied Marxism in depth as a university student and was later persuaded by communist ideals after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Gradually, Vargas Llosa came to believe that socialism was incompatible with what he considered to be general liberties and freedoms. The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred with the so-called 'Padilla Affair', when the Castro regime imprisoned the poet Heberto Padilla for a month in 1971. Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote to Castro protesting the Cuban political system and its imprisonment of the artist. Vargas Llosa has identified himself with liberalism rather than extreme left-wing political ideologies ever since. Since he relinquished his earlier leftism, he has opposed both left- and right-wing authoritarian regimes.

Investigatory Commission

With his appointment to the Investigatory Commission on the in 1983, he experienced what literary critic Jean Franco calls "the most uncomfortable event in ispolitical career". Unfortunately for Vargas Llosa, his involvement with the Investigatory Commission led to immediate negative reactions and defamation from the Peruvian press; many suggested that the massacre was a conspiracy to keep the journalists from reporting the presence of government paramilitary forces in Uchuraccay. The commission concluded that it was the indigenous villagers who had been responsible for the killings; for Vargas Llosa the incident showed "how vulnerable democracy is in Latin America and how easily it dies under dictatorships of the right and left". These conclusions, and Vargas Llosa personally, came under intense criticism: anthropologist Enrique Mayer, for instance, accused him of "paternalism", while fellow anthropologist Carlos Iván Degregori criticized him for his ignorance of the Andean world. Vargas Llosa was accused of actively colluding in a government cover-up of army involvement in the massacre. American Latin American literature scholar Misha Kokotovic summarizes that the novelist was charged with seeing "indigenous cultures as a 'primitive' obstacle to the full realization of his Western model of modernity". Shocked both by the atrocity itself and then by the reaction his report had provoked, Vargas Llosa responded that his critics were apparently more concerned with his report than with the hundreds of peasants who later died at the hands of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla organization.

Presidential candidacy

In 1987, he helped form and soon became a leader of the center-right party Movimiento Libertad. The following year his party entered a coalition with the parties of Peru's two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaúnde Terry (of the Popular Action party) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (of the '' Partido Popular Cristiano''), to form the tripartite center-right coalition known as '' Frente Democrático'' (FREDEMO). He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the FREDEMO coalition with the support of the United States. He proposed neoliberal policies similar to Fujimori that included a drastic economic 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. 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. Vargas Llosa included an account of his run for the presidency in the memoir ''A Fish in the Water'' (''El pez en el agua'', 1993). Since his political defeat, he has focused mainly on his writing, with only occasional political involvement.

A month after losing the election, at the invitation of Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa attended a conference in Mexico entitled, "The 20th Century: The Experience of Freedom". Focused on the collapse of communist rule in central and eastern Europe, it was broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September. Addressing the conference on 30 August 1990, Vargas Llosa embarrassed his hosts by condemning the Mexican system of power based on the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had been in power for 61 years. Criticizing the PRI by name, he commented, "I don't believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety." He declared, "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the USSR, not Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship." The statement, "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship" became a cliché in Mexico and internationally, until the PRI fell from power in 2000.

Later life

Vargas Llosa has mainly lived in Madrid since the 1990s, but spends roughly three months of the year in Peru with his extended family. He also frequently visits London where he occasionally spends long periods. Vargas Llosa acquired Spanish citizenship in 1993, though he still holds Peruvian nationality. The writer often reiterates his love for both countries. In his Nobel speech he observed: "I carry Peru deep inside me because that is where I was born, grew up, was formed, and lived those experiences of childhood and youth that shaped my personality and forged my calling". He then added: "I love Spain as much as Peru, and my debt to her is as great as my gratitude. If not for Spain, I never would have reached this podium or become a known writer".

Mario Vargas Llosa served as a visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard University during the 1992–1993 academic year. Harvard later recognized Vargas Llosa by conferring upon him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in 1999. In 1994 he was elected a member of the ''Real Academia Española'' (Royal Spanish Academy), he took up seat L on 15 January 1996. Vargas Llosa joined the Mont Pelerin Society in 2014. He is also a member of Washington, D.C. based think tank, the Inter-American Dialogue.

Political work

Spain

He has been involved in the Spain's political arena. In February 2008 he stopped supporting the People's Party in favor of the recently created Union, Progress and Democracy, claiming that certain conservative views held by the former party are at odds with his classical liberal beliefs. His political ideologies appear in the book '' Política razonable'', written with Fernando Savater, Rosa Díez, Álvaro Pombo, Albert Boadella