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Mario Vargas Llosa’s death, at 89, brings a literary epoch to a close. Last great survivor of the “Boom” generation of the 1960s and ’70s, which thrust Latin American writing on to a global stage, the Peruvian author — along with friend-turned-rival Gabriel García Márquez — mined the culture and politics of his region for stories that transfixed the world.
Both began with a mission to make innovative literature a weapon against a cruel and stifling social order. But the liberal from Arequipa became a firm admirer of Margaret Thatcher: I once saw anti-Vargas Llosa protesters at the Buenos Aires book fair brandish posters with photos of their handshake. Meanwhile, the Colombian radical clung to the revolutionary faith of Castro’s Cuba.
In his work, however, Vargas Llosa the polemicist yielded to the artist who turned the utopian dreams — and dashed hopes — of Latin America into an abiding, inspiring theme. Across literary registers that stretch from erotic comedy to historical epic to deep-state thriller, he charted the unquenchable drive to make a richer life, a more just world. He showed as well the forces that may thwart it. To him, those blocks derived not just from corrupt homegrown elites or interfering foreign powers, but wayward humankind itself.
Yet this sceptical, even tragic, outlook unfolded through a long series of exuberant, visionary, often thoroughly entertaining books. Here are five that will steer readers through his turbulent, conflicted, ever-changing continent.
Conversation in the Cathedral (1969, translated by Gregory Rabassa). This ambitious third novel apparently helped push Vargas Llosa over the line for 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. The “cathedral” is a grubby bar in 1950s Lima, where a minister’s son, and his chauffeur, meet to discuss — and discover — the secrets of Peru’s rapacious ruling elite. From the son’s revolt against a tyrant father to race- and class-prejudice and the fatal attractions of power, Vargas Llosa explores motifs that recur throughout his work. He does so via the overlapping, interweaving polyphonic dialogue he also made his own. Indebted to the “Boom” pioneers, such as Alejo Carpentier and Julio Cortázar, the novel matches stylistic audacity to social critique.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977, translated by Helen Lane). After he (scandalously) married his uncle’s sister-in-law, Vargas Llosa survived for a while as a hack-for-hire. His life-long delight in the Latin American soap opera and its labyrinthine melodramas propels this smart, funny, ribald double narrative. The increasingly outlandish radio plots of Pedro Camacho punctuate young Marito’s affair with his relative. Reality and fantasy entwine as the novel pays its screwball tribute to the liberating power of (even humble) art. But then, fact and fiction often entangled for Vargas Llosa: when he ran for president, opponents read out steamy passages from Aunt Julia to discredit him.
The War of the End of the World (1981, translated by Helen Lane). Painted as a grand, sombre canvas, this sweeping historical novel recounts the ecstatic origins and blood-soaked finale of a peasant revolt that convulsed 1890s Brazil. In the Canudos War, desperate country folk in Bahia followed a charismatic preacher, and his dreams of heaven on earth, into a catastrophic conflict with the forces of Brazil’s secular state. Vargas Llosa’s long quarrel with the utopian strain in Latin American life finds its fullest expression here. At the end of the apocalyptic rainbow lies not joyous uplift but suffering and death. Beauty and horror intertwine, but we never lose sight of the oppression that pushes hopeless people towards would-be messiahs.
A Fish in the Water (1993, translated by Helen Lane). Candidate for a liberal, pro-market alliance, in 1990 Vargas Llosa nearly became president of Peru. His failure, at the hands of Alberto Fujimori’s crooked but cunning brand of populism, would give rise to one of his most enjoyable books. The memoir alternates full-flavoured scenes from the writer’s privileged but insecure youth with rueful, aggrieved yet upbeat reports from the campaign trail. Vargas Llosa, with his platform of civic and economic freedoms, really did come close: he headed first-round voting. His opponent soon proved to be a vicious gangster, later given a 25-year jail sentence. Yet the fizzing energy and artistry of this chronicle of defeat make the reader very glad he lost.
The Feast of the Goat (2000, translated by Edith Grossman). It’s not enough to denounce the seductive strongmen who have despoiled Latin American societies over two centuries; writers have to understand, and transmit, their allure. In his masterful take on the “dictator novel”, Vargas Llosa does that. The career of Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961), for three decades murderous despot of the Dominican Republic, propels a twisting, galloping narrative. It depicts the dynamics of deception and control on a public and domestic scale. An abusive authority-figure to his nation, and his young female victims, the “Goat” embodies “the enthronement, through propaganda and violence, of a monstrous lie”. Vargas Llosa reimagines events from the mid-20th century but insists that dictatorial dangers persist: “Something from those times is still in the air.”
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