The Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. (Credit: AFP)
Mario Vargas Llosa, a titan of Hispanic-American letters, passed away in Lima at 89. He left behind a monumental body of work and a passionate love life. He was the last survivor of a golden generation and embodied the alliance of Flaubertian rigor and South American fervor of tireless storytellers and dreamers.
Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa in 1936 and raised between Bolivia and Peru by a single mother. He learned the magic of words very early on, then confronted the brutality of the Lima military academy. He would draw from it the idea for "The Time of the Hero," his first masterpiece. However, starting in 1959 in Paris, he officially became a writer. He was only 23 then, with a copy of "Madame Bovary" in his pocket, an early taste for complicated, forbidden passions — having just married Julia, his aunt by marriage — and a devouring ambition.
"It was thanks to Flaubert that I learned method and discipline," he would confide. In the cafes of Saint-Germain, the corridors of AFP, or the classrooms where he taught Spanish, Vargas Llosa honed his pen, immersed his thoughts in the French crucible and wrote his first novels. France welcomed him in the Pléiade in 2016, elected him to the Académie française in 2021 and adopted him as one of its own, even though he never wrote in French.
Flamboyant intellectual of the Latin American 'boom'
Alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa formed, as early as the 1960s, what would be called the Latin American boom. Unlike his companions, often drawn into the lyricism of magical realism, he chose the surgical precision of the realist novel, injecting sharp social critique. "The Green House," "Conversation in the Cathedral," "The Feast of the Goat": so many frescoes dissecting the continent's political pathologies.
The man had a chiseled turn of phrase, sharp judgment and tenacious idealism. Yet, in the 1970s, an ideological shift distanced him from revolutionary leftist circles. The Padilla affair in Cuba was a rupture: Vargas Llosa distanced himself from Castro and embraced a Tocqueville-style liberalism. He became a fierce critic of South American populism and European extremes, finding in Jean-François Revel a French alter ego.
His work is abundant, but he did not limit himself to novels. He dreamed of being Peru's president, launched a campaign in 1990, lost to an unknown man named Alberto Fujimori and returned to his manuscripts.
His private life followed the realm of the romantic. First, his aunt Julia, muse of "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," then Patricia, his cousin and wife for five decades, "with an upturned nose and indomitable character." He would say that his life would have descended into chaos without her. Finally, the Spaniard Isabel Preysler, a socialite and former wife of Julio Iglesias, drew the novelist into the glossy pages of tabloid press. He embraced this incursion with biting confidence: "If that's the price to pay for love, I'll pay it."
Yet no episode captures the myth more than that punch — both literary and literal — given in 1976 to Gabriel García Márquez. A friendship was shattered over a cryptic phrase: "What you did to Patricia is not done." The rest? A pact of silence that even death hadn’t broken. Two giants, a slap and the mystery, worthy of great classical dramas.
Vargas Llosa kept writing until his last breath. His final work, "The Quiet Gaze (of Pérez Galdós)," is a tribute to the Spanish novelist he admired, proving that even on the verge of death, the sacred fire did not wane. During his Nobel acceptance speech in 2010, he spoke not of glory or politics but of Patricia, Flaubert and the miracle of fiction.
"Latin Americans are born dreamers," he said. He was a lucid dreamer, a methodical storyteller, a man of letters desperately free. Literature lost a leading figure, France an adopted academic and Latin America an anxious conscience.
This article was translated from L'Orient-Le Jour.
