Mario Vargas Llosa, the best known living Peruvian author, was born in 1936 in Arequipa, the second most important city in Peru. His parents separated just before he was born and when he was two years old he went to live in Cochabamba in Bolivia with his maternal grandparents, where his grandfather had been posted as an honorary consul. Later he returned to Peru and lived in Piura in the north of the country. His experiences in this city would feature later in some of his works. His parents' reconciliation a few years later meant that all the family went to live in Lima, the capital of Peru, and it was only then that he met his father Ernesto Vargas Maldonado for the first time. Mario Vargas Llosa's father was an officer in the navy and thought that his son's upbringing with his mother and grandparents had spoiled him and allowed the development of his literary inclinations, which Vargas Llosa's father considered unsuitable for a man. He decided that he could not allow his son to pursue literature as a career and sent him to continue his secondary education in a military academy, hoping that the discipline of such an institution would make a real man of him and end his literary tendencies. This did not happen; in fact, Vargas Llosa's time at the Leoncio Prado military academy gave him his first victory in his battle to become a writer, since he did a lot of clandestine reading and wrote poems, love letters and semi-pornographic stories. Above all, ironically, the violent world of the Leoncio Prado military academy would become the source for the setting of his first successful novel La ciudad y los perros [The Time of the Hero] (1963).
The 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s were a turning point for Latin-American literature. For the first time Latin-American novelists were gaining international recognition, and their works were translated into many different languages, thus becoming part of the Western literary canon. Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the four authors who stand out in this period, the other three being Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Julio Cortázar (Argentina) and Carlos Fuentes (Mexico). Two other authors may also be included in this group: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba) and José Donoso (Chile). This period is known as the boom in Latin-American literature, marked by dense, complex and convoluted novels in which the authors use a variety of experimental techniques and try to explore and explain the complexity of the continent's history and identity. It is widely accepted that Vargas Llosa's first three novels belong to this period.
When he was still in school Mario Vargas Llosa wrote his first play, entitled La huída del Inca [The Flight of the Inca]. This drama was staged in Peru for the first time in 1953. His first published work of fiction was a collection of short stories entitled Los jefes [The Cubs and Other Stories] (1959), followed in 1967 by another short story, Los cachorros [The Cubs]. But it was his novel La ciudad y los perros that rocketed him to instant international recognition. He had been working on it for a few years and it was a chance meeting with the well known Spanish publisher Carlos Barral which motivated him to send his novel to the Fifth Annual Biblioteca Breve Prize. Vargas Llosa won the contest – for the first time the jury unanimously agreed on the winner, and also for the first time the winner was a Latin-American rather than a Spanish writer. La ciudad y los perros was an experimental polyphonic novel based on the author's personal experience at the Leoncio Prado academy. The microcosm of the military academy is used to portray the entrenched hierarchy that divided social groups in Peruvian society. In this novel, Cava, one of the young cadets, is given the mission of stealing the questions of the forthcoming chemistry exam, but he is betrayed by one of his schoolmates and subsequently expelled. During some manoeuvres the cadet who revealed the identity of the robber is shot dead. Another cadet, Alberto, reveals to one of the officers what really happened, but when Lieutenant Gamboa communicates this to the authorities of the academy, they decide on a ‘cover-up' and stick to the official version that there had been an accident. Gamboa is sent to a remote location in the high Andes to ensure his voice is not heard.
His second novel La casa verde [The Green House] (1966) interlaces two distinct worlds, Santa María de Nieva, a remote location in the jungle, which has not yet been colonised, and Piura, in the north of Peru, one of the first colonial posts established by the Spanish. La casa verde was originally two separate novels which the author was writing simultaneously. However, as he worked on them, Mario Vargas Llosa realised that the two stories intertwined and decided to fuse the two settings. Sergeant Lituma and Bonifacia are the main characters in the novel, and each travels in the opposite direction: Lituma ends up in Santa María de Nieva in the jungle, and Bonifacia travels from her village in the jungle to urban Piura on the coast. The army, the church, the family and the brothel are the institutions which facilitate, through violence and exploitation, the contacts and relationships among the characters in the novel. All the characters end up destroyed morally, physically and psychologically. This novel was widely acclaimed by critics and readers, and in 1967 was awarded the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize. This prize was created in honour of the well known Venezuelan writer, who was still alive at the time and gave the award to Vargas Llosa in person. On that occasion, Mario Vargas Llosa made his acceptance speech entitled “La literatura es fuego” [“Literature is Fire”], based on Jean Paul Sartre's idea that the words of a writer can be compared to loaded pistols. Vargas Llosa stated that the writer is always a rebel ready to challenge the status quo, always discontent with society.
Conversación en La Catedral [Conversation in the Cathedral] (1969), his third novel, is set in Lima, and some of the spaces used before will appear in this novel again: the brothel, upper-middle-class households, a bohemian bar, and student life. We find a distinct effort by the author to portray political life in Peru. The novel gives the reader an insight into life under the dictatorship of General Manuel Odría in 1950s Peru. The presence of the omniscient narrator is diminished, as anticipated by his two previous novels, particularly La casa verde. Once again the author uses the “Chinese box” technique by which an “outer” conversation hides other “inner” conversations. The characters are in charge of the narration and often the reader struggles to follow the dialogue. There are very few clues leading to the identification of the characters taking part in a dialogue or a conversation. The novel unravels in the single setting of La Catedral bar in the old quarter of Lima, where Santiago Zavala, an upper-middle-class young man, and his ex servant Ambrosio, spend a few hours talking. It portrays accurately the repressive nature of the Odría regime.
After Conversación en La Catedral, parody and humour became part of Vargas Llosa's literary production. His novels become more accessible and less complex, starting his post-boom period. In 1973 he published Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Captain Pantoja and the Special Service], a parody of the military and their supposed efficiency in running the country when they take over after a coup d'etat. Some of the settings used before appear again, namely the army, the jungle and the brothel. Captain Pantoja has the mission of establishing a brothel to be used by the soldiers posted in the jungle. Although he is successful at running it with military precision at first, his mission eventually fails, victim of its own success. Humour and parody are used effectively in the novel to criticise military power, the traditional family, religious fanaticism and the values of the ruling middle class.
La tía Julia y el escribidor [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter] (1977) was his next novel, and probably the most autobiographical he has written, fictionalizing his first marriage to his aunt (by marriage), Julia Urquidi. The “real” story of Marito, who aspires to be a serious writer, and is narrated in the odd chapters, alternates with the invented scripts for radio soap operas attributed to Pedro Camacho, the script writer. At first it is possible to keep the two story-lines separate, but gradually Marito's “real” life and Pedro Camacho's melodramatic stories start to intermingle. The family is again an important theme, but so is the popular media and popular culture in general. In La tía Julia y el escribidor the author questions autobiographical “truth” and challenges the boundaries between high and popular culture, between reality and fiction.
In many of his novels Mario Vargas Llosa exhibits a metafictional and self-reflexive bent, emphasizing the writing process itself, as in La tía Julia y el escribidor, Kathie y el hipopótamo [Kathie and the Hippopotamus] (1983), and El hablador [The Storyteller] (1987). In others, the focus has been on the historical background behind the fiction. La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World] (1981) is based on the diary Os Sertoes [Rebellion in the Backlands] (1903) written by Euclides da Cunha in the last few years of the 19th century about the war in Canudos, in the Brazilian badlands. Vargas Llosa's re-creation adds characters and events, and, as he does in most of his work, rewrites it in two locations rather than in a single setting: Sertao and the capital of Bahia. The events which originate in Sertao are contrasted to those happening in Bahia.
La guerra del fin del mundo is the starting point for another strand of Vargas Llosa's work: the historical novel, which will be followed by Historia de Mayta [The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta] (1984) and later La fiesta del Chivo [The Feast of the Goat] (2000). Historia de Mayta explores once again the relationship between history and fiction, highlighting the author's preoccupation with ideology, evident in the discourses of Marxism, Christianity, and economic liberalism that permeate the novel. His meticulous approach to researching historical sources for writing a novel derives from his work in journalism (he still writes regularly for Latin-American and European newspapers) as well as his admiration for Flaubert's precise use of historical material. Additionally, Mario Vargas Llosa also worked during his student years as an assistant to the respected Peruvian historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea, for whom he felt great admiration. He even contemplated reading history at university. It is this contradictory pull exercised on his creative effort by history and imaginative literature that he sought to reconcile in his historical novels.
El elogio de la madrastra [Praise of the Stepmother] (1988) was Vargas Llosa's first erotic novel, in which the main characters, Don Rigoberto and his young son Fonchito, are transgressors of moral codes through their creative sensual fantasies. In Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto [Notebooks of Don Rigoberto] (1997) the author's prolific erotic imagination is expressed in the entries written in Don Rigoberto's notebook. He is dull and conventional in ‘real' life, but daring and adventurous in his imaginary world. Both novels have Lima as their setting and in both a series of paintings provide the link between characters and events.
With the publication of ¿Quién mató a Palomino Morelo? [Who Killed Palomino Morelo?] (1986) Vargas Llosa takes up the genre of the detective novel, and uses the mysterious murder of a young air force recruit to revisit his denunciation of social prejudice and unfairness in the Peru of the 1950s. Lituma en los Andes [Death in the Andes] (1993) focuses on the irrationality of violence and is reminiscent of the traumatic years of civil war in Peru, in which the confrontation between Sendero Luminoso guerrillas and the security forces left almost 70,000 people dead, many of them civilians. Three unresolved, violent and gruesome deaths remain unresolved to the very end of the novel.
La fiesta del Chivo is a novel in which Vargas Llosa returns to the old preoccupation with the inner workings of society by using the life and death of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo to depict the destructive force of excesses of power. The story alternates between the past and the present, starting in 1996 with the return of Urania Cabral to Santo Domingo. She comes from New York to see her father who was a supporter of the dictatorship during the Trujillo regime and is very old and very ill, unable to speak. Through Urania the reader finds out about the Trujillo dictatorship and the fear and hatred that permeated society during his years in power.
One of Mario Vargas Llosa's most recent novels is Las travesuras de la niña mala [The Bad Girl] (2006), in which the author returns to his exploration of the boundaries between autobiography and “truth”, which are revealed to be blurred and unreliable. The novel is a romantic story told in a modern context and setting, set against the background of some of the main changes that have marked contemporary life in the western world: 1968, the “flower-power” movement, the myth of drugs, gay pride and feminism. In each chapter of Las travesuras de la niña mala we find a protagonist who is a dear friend of Ricardo's, one of the two main characters of the novel. Although those friends are lost, vanished or gradually disappear from the story, friendship endures throughout the narration and is as important as love. The story, spanning over forty years, has as its main protagonist Lily, the “bad girl”, who meets Ricardo, the “good boy”, back in their teenage years in Miraflores, Peru, and reinvents herself several times, first as a guerrilla fighter, then as the wife of a French civil servant, the wife of an English gentleman horse trainer, and finally as the lover of a Japanese crook. The novel is set in France, England and Spain and features Paris in the 1960s, London in the 1970s and Madrid after the Spanish return to democracy. The use of these locations may explain the fact that the novel has been very well received in Europe.
The story for another of his recent novels, El paraíso en la otra esquina [The Way to Paradise] (2003), is based on the lives of Flora Tristan and her grandson, Paul Gauguin. The pioneer of feminism and the painter who looked for beauty in its purest form interlace their lives in this novel, although in real life they never met because he was born four years after his grandmother had died. Flora Tristan defended the rights of women at a time when gender equality was little more than a utopian ideal, while Paul Gauguin believed that beauty was the supreme value, which he constantly sought to express in his artistic endeavours. Their similar aspirations in the realm of the social and the aesthetic, respectively, form the main connecting link in Llosa's story.
Mario Vargas Llosa has also written a number of essays in which he discusses his ideas about the writing of literature. Thus, his book La orgía perpetua [The Perpetual Orgy] (1975), written as homage to Gustav Flaubert, proclaims the cannibalising nature of the novel which can appropriate and incorporate all the other genres. The essay also questions Jean Paul Sartre's literary ideas, which he had embraced during his boom period. Another important critical work, as a result of which he was awarded his doctorate from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, is entitled García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (1971). The study expounds on the obsessive nature of literary work, often emerging as a result of the writer's need to exorcise his “demons”. After he ended his close friendship with Gabriel García Márquez due to a personal dispute which has never been clarified, Vargas Llosa prevented this essay from being reprinted until recently, when he gave permission for it to be included in the full collection of his works published by Círculo de Lectores / Galaxia Gutemberg in Madrid. A recent critical book, which he took 6 years to prepare, is La tentación de lo imposible [The Temptation of the Impossible] (2004), an exploration of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, which he sees as the last of classical narratives before the advent of the first modern novel, Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert.
At the end of the 1980s Mario Vargas Llosa decided to go into politics and ran for President in his native Peru. For most of the campaign he was the favourite to win the contest, but in the end he lost to a little known rival, Alberto Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, who led a very corrupt government until the year 2000 when he fled the country and sought refuge in Japan. Many readers and admirers of Mario Vargas Llosa felt relief that he had lost the election and could return to his literary work. The author wrote about his experience in politics in the book El pez en el agua [A Fish in the Water] (1993).
Mario Vargas Llosa's dramatic production includes La señorita de Tacna [The Young Lady of Tacna] (1981), a play about love and old age which at the same time reflects on the act of writing through the mediation of Belisario, a writer within the play, and the memories of Elvira, the old lady of Tacna known as Mamaé, who is almost 100 years old. La Chunga (1986) takes place in a bar in Piura run by la Chunga, an ageless woman, which has four men as regulars, always drinking beer and playing dice. The play questions the boundaries between reality and fantasy by casting doubt on what the four men believe happened to the beautiful, young Meche. In the process Vargas Llosa also explores the shortcomings of machismo in society. Kathie y el hipopótamo once again is an opportunity for self-reflection on the process of writing fiction, with temporal shifts adding to the perception of the illusory nature of the “real”. Al pie del Támesis (2008) is a play based on the real life story of Venezuelan author Esdras Parra, whom writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante met after he had undergone a sex change operation, and whose experience Cabrera Infante then narrated to Vargas Llosa. Transexuality is consequently used in this play to challenge conventions on gender identity and the imposition of roles in society. At a larger level, the play is a plea for tolerance, showing the author's admiration for transgressive characters and questioning fixed identitarian boundaries.
The abuses of power, the world of the military, the poverty of ideology, the pursuit of freedom, and the search for utopian aspirations, are, among others, some of the main themes running through his novels. Much of Mario Vargas Llosa's fiction could be described, at some level, as metafictional: while offering a “realist” plot with a verisimilar depiction of historical and human experience, his prose constantly questions the nature of reality, highlighting its illusive nature and foregrounding the brittle boundary between the “real” and the fictional. At the same time, however, behind the postmodern nature of some of his experimental prose, Llosa's work as a whole articulates an ethical and political vision at the centre of which lies resistance to, transgression of and rebellion against passive compliance to arbitrary social conventions.
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Citation: Rodriguez-Saona, Roberto. "Mario Vargas Llosa". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 January 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5436, accessed 22 January 2025.]
