A short life of the author
Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 28 March 1936, Arequipa, Peru) is the supreme architect of the Latin American novel — a writer whose structural ambition, narrative virtuosity, and sheer productive energy have made him one of the central figures of world literature for over sixty years. His novels, which range from military academies and Amazonian brothels to Caribbean dictatorships and nineteenth-century millenarian uprisings, are distinguished by an extraordinary command of technique: multiple narrators, layered time-schemes, and what he calls “communicating vessels” — the juxtaposition of disparate scenes to generate meaning through their collision.
Life and Career
Vargas Llosa’s childhood was scarred by his father, Ernesto, who reappeared after years of absence and sent the fourteen-year-old Mario to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima — an experience of brutal discipline that became the basis of his first novel. He studied literature at the University of San Marcos and journalism in Lima before leaving for Europe in 1958, living in Paris, London, and Barcelona during the decade in which the Latin American Boom transformed world literature.
La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1963) was his explosive debut: a polyphonic novel of cruelty, honour, and institutional violence set in the military academy. The Peruvian military publicly burned 1,000 copies. La casa verde (The Green House, 1966), which interweaves five narrative lines across Amazonian jungle and coastal desert, is one of the most technically complex novels of the century. Conversación en La Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969), a vast novel of political corruption in the Odría dictatorship, opens with the question “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” — a sentence that has become proverbial in Spanish.
Vargas Llosa’s political trajectory is one of the most dramatic in modern literary history. He began as a socialist, supported the Cuban Revolution, broke with Castro over the Padilla affair in 1971, and moved steadily rightward through the 1970s and 1980s, eventually running for president of Peru in 1990 on a liberal-conservative platform. He lost to Alberto Fujimori. The campaign and its aftermath are recounted in El pez en el agua (A Fish in the Water, 1993), his finest memoir.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 and has continued to publish novels, essays, and political commentary at a pace that shows no sign of diminishing.
Major Works and Themes
Vargas Llosa’s central preoccupation is the relationship between fiction and reality — what he calls “the truth of lies.” His novels are populated by storytellers, liars, propagandists, and fantasists, and they interrogate the ways in which narrative constructs (and distorts) our understanding of the world.
La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1981) — a retelling of the Canudos rebellion in nineteenth-century Brazil — is his most ambitious novel: an epic of fanaticism, violence, and the impossibility of understanding that draws on Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões. La fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000), about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, is his most powerful political novel.
La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977) is his most entertaining book — a comic novel based on his own early marriage to his aunt-by-marriage, interlaced with increasingly deranged radio soap-opera plots.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Vargas Llosa is, with García Márquez, the dominant figure of the Boom. Their friendship and its spectacular rupture — Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face at a Mexico City cinema in 1976, and they never spoke again — is one of the great literary feuds. The cause has never been definitively established.
His political conservatism has made him a controversial figure in Latin America, but his literary stature is beyond question. The Nobel committee cited “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
Key Works
- The Time of the Hero (1963)
- The Green House (1966)
- 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 Feast of the Goat (2000)
- The Bad Girl (2006)
Collecting Vargas Llosa
Spanish first editions published by Seix Barral (Barcelona) and later Alfaguara are the primary targets. Seix Barral published the early masterpieces during the Boom years.
La ciudad y los perros (1963, Seix Barral) is his most valuable first edition — the debut that announced a major talent. The fact that the Peruvian military burned copies adds to its mystique. First editions bring $1,000–$5,000.
La casa verde (1966, Seix Barral) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969, Seix Barral) are the other major Boom-era titles. First editions bring $500–$3,000.
English-language translations from Harper & Row and Farrar, Straus and Giroux — particularly those by Gregory Rabassa and Helen Lane — are the secondary market. Signed Vargas Llosa material is reasonably available; he has been a public literary figure for six decades and signs willingly at events. Inscribed copies to other Boom writers are the most prized association items.