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Mario Vargas Llosa

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Mario Vargas Llosa
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Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa (birth name: Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa) (born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer who is one of Latin America's leading novelists and essayists.

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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. At the age of 14, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, which later inspired his ideas for his first novel.

A year before his graduation, Vargas Llosa was already working as an amateur journalist. He retired 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 representation of his first dramatist work, La Huida del 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. Given the difference of ages, the relationship did not last long. 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 1959.

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, 1963), based on his teenage experiences at a military school, Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado.

Rise to success

The work met with wide acclaim, and its author hailed as one of the main exponents of the Latin American literature boom, alongside Argentina's Julio Cortázar, Mexico's Carlos Fuentes, Chile's Isabel Allende & Pablo Neruda and, of course, 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 showed as a stepping for 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 (The Time of the Hero, 1962) by writing La Casa Verde (The Green House, 1966), a novel that shows the considerable influence that the reading of 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 Garcia Marquez.

Vargas Llosa's third novel completes what many critics consider to be his most valuable narrative cycle. Having been published in a four-volume edition, Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral), 1969) was Vargas Llosa first attempt at what he calls a "total novel", that is the attempt to fictionalize all the levels of a certain society and its reflection on the different levels of perceptual reality. 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 in which 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.

Vargas Llosa followed this serious novel with the shorter and much more comic Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service, 1972), which, through a series of vignettes of dialogues and documents, follows the establishment of a visiting service of prostitutes by the Peruvian armed forces.

Political involvement

During the 1980s, Vargas Llosa became politically active, and became known for his staunch market liberal views. He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 and lost to Alberto Fujimori. During the campaign, his opponents read racey passages of his works over the radio in an apparent attempt to shock voters. Although he beat Fujimori 34% to 29% in the first round, Vargas Llosa lost to Fujimori's 57% of the vote in the subsequent run-off.

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." Identifying Humala with Fujimori, Vargas Llosa 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."

Recent works

After leaving Peru for Spain shortly after the election, and acquiring Spanish nationality in 1993, Vargas Llosa has returned to live in Lima. He continues to write historical novels such as The Feast of the Goat (2000, English trans. 2001), an account of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise) a historical novel about Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristan.

His most recent work Mischiefs of the Bad Girl is the portrait of the tortuous love affair between a Peruvian expat in Paris and his chamaleon-like paramour, for over forty years.

His work often critiqued the hierarchy of social class and race present in contemporary Peru and Latin America. Many of his works were also autobiographical in nature, as La casa verde (The Green House) (1966) and Tía Julia y el Escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) (1977). His sweeping 1981 historical novel The War of the End of The World was set in the 19th-century Brazilian province of Bahia, and is based on actual events in Brazilian history, the rebellion of Sebastianist millenarist followers of Antonio Conselheiro in the Canudos War.

Vargas Llosa won the 1995 Jerusalem Prize. He has been a member of the Real Academia Española since 1996. He has taught at Georgetown University in Washington, DC since 2001.

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 businessman; and Morgana, a photographer.

External links

Works

Fiction

Non-fiction

Critical Bibliography

 

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