Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading agendas.
Such was Updike’s influence that readers paid heed when, in the mid-1980s, he developed a sustained literary man-crush on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at 89.
More than once in his reviews of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Updike took note of the author’s handsomeness and urbanity. He was more impressed by Vargas Llosa’s substantial intelligence, his learning, his versatility and his imagination, which could conjure the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is gay, or the mixed feelings of a citified idealist engaging in a gun battle in the Andes while beset with altitude sickness.
Vargas Llosa “has replaced Gabriel García Márquez” as the South American novelist North American readers must catch up on, Updike wrote in 1986, four years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and 24 years before Vargas Llosa himself would.
Even Updike was two decades late to the writer’s work. Vargas Llosa had already published most of his major and enduring novels, including “The Time of the Hero” (1963), “The Green House” (1966), “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969) and “The War of the End of the World” (1981). These grainy, raunchy, politically minded and mind-expanding books found a worldwide audience but were slower to catch on in the United States.
Vargas Llosa had helped start, in the early 1960s, a movement that became known as the Boom, a term applied to a freewheeling and socially conscious new generation of Latin American writers: García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso and Miguel Ángel Asturias, among others.
Vargas Llosa was the last living Boom writer, which doubles the impact of his loss. He was the world’s savviest and most accomplished political novelist.
Born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, he tangled with his domineering father, who did not want him to become a writer, because writers were, in his view, losers. Vargas Llosa was 14 when his father enrolled him in Leoncio Prado Military Academy.
“I went to Leoncio Prado because my father thought that the military was the best cure for literature and for those activities that he understood as very marginalized,” Vargas Llosa said in a 2018 New York Times Magazine profile. “On the contrary, he gave me the subject of my first novel!”
That novel was “The Time of the Hero.” It has lost little of its impact. The bullying and torture among the cadets is intense and hard to stomach, but Vargas Llosa’s soulfulness and his bedrock interest in life are everywhere apparent. The writer spoke frequently about William Faulkner’s influence on his work, and that influence is felt in this novel’s nonlinear motion and its confident deployment of multiple perspectives.
“The Time of the Hero” put Vargas Llosa on the map in Latin America. His depiction of Leoncio Prado Military Academy was so coruscating that he claimed the school’s leaders made a public bonfire of hundreds of copies. It was also, in the words of a judge for Spain’s Premio Biblioteca Breve Prize, “the best novel in the Spanish language in the past 30 years.”
Vargas Llosa had, in the mid-1970s, a comedic period. His slight but gregarious novel “Captain Pantoja and the Special Service” (1973) is about Peruvian troops in the Amazon, the prostitutes who are brought in to attend to them, and the strait-laced captain who oversees the project.
“Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” (1977) is set in the world of radio novelas (soap operas). It’s about a young aspiring writer who marries his much-older aunt. (In real life, Vargas Llosa wedded his older aunt by marriage when he was 19.) A portrait of Peru in the 1950s, the book is sweet, offbeat and full of love for the movies the couples attend while courting.
The sex writing in Vargas Llosa’s novels was graphic, realistic and sometimes funny, but a courtliness attended it. In his memoir, “A Fish in the Water” (1993), he wrote:
To make a girl fall for you and formally declare that she is your sweetheart is a custom that was to decline little by little, until today it is something that to the younger generations, speedy and pragmatic when it comes to love, seems like prehistoric idiocy. I still have a tender memory of those rituals that love consisted of when I was an adolescent and it is to them that I owe the fact that that stage of my life has remained in my memory not only as violent and repressive but also as made up of delicate and intense moments that compensated me for all the rest.
His stormier memories may include the punch he threw at García Márquez, a friend, in 1976 at a film premiere. The details have never been made plain, but it was rumored that it had something to do with Vargas Llosa’s wife.
García Márquez’s black eye was memorialized in a famous photograph by Rodrigo Moya. Its message to the world was: If you are ever photographed with a black eye, be sure there is a big grin on your face.
Vargas Llosa’s interest in human affairs led him to politics, on the page and off. The Nobel Prize committee, in awarding him the 2010 Nobel, noted his “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”
He researched his novels so intensely that he resembled a mini Robert Caro. Unlike Caro, he moved easily in the social company of political titans, a fact that gave the details in his novels a sometimes garish and sometimes seedy verisimilitude.
For decades he wrote an important opinion column for the Spanish newspaper El País. As noted in the Times Magazine profile, those who came to his 80th birthday party included “the president of Chile (Sebastián Piñera), a former president of Uruguay (Luis Alberto Lacalle), two former presidents of Colombia (Álvaro Uribe and Andrés Pastrana) and two former prime ministers of Spain (José María Aznar and Felipe González).”
Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru in 1990, as a candidate of the center-right, and lost by a wide margin. “Apart from Vaclav Havel, no other writer in recent memory has taken his ambition as high as the presidency,” Alma Guillermoprieto wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1994.
His own politics could be hard to pin down. When young he was an ardent leftist, but he drifted slowly toward neoliberalism. He was in favor of open elections, gay rights and limited government. In more recent years, he shocked some observers by embracing far-right authoritarian candidates in Latin America and Spain.
Vargas Llosa’s political novels are morally complex and meticulously observed, but life’s absurdity sneaks into them. In his 1986 novel “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” a man attends a tense meeting of political revolutionaries and worries that the stack of Workers Voice magazines he is sitting on will topple and render him ridiculous.
Updike wrote about that same book, “This is one of the few novels I have read where the characters, in the midst of fighting for their lives, catch colds, as people do.”
Vargas Llosa’s last masterpiece was “The Feast of the Goat” (2000), a political thriller set during the final years of Rafael Trujillo’s cruel and chaotic dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. One of the pivotal characters is Urania Cabral, a woman whose father was a prominent opposition figure, and through her the book acquires a human center and becomes a fluid mediation on family, memory and identity.
For someone so invested in history and research, Vargas Llosa spoke often about the irrational elements of fiction writing. “The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of intellect or reason than bewitched me,” he told The Paris Review in 1990. “These are stories capable of completely annihilating all my critical faculties so that I’m left there, in suspense.”
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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