Mario Vargas Llosa Totally Explained

Everything about Mario Vargas Llosa totally explained

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and world-wide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom.
   Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral, 1969/1975). He continues to write prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. Several, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982), have been adapted as feature films.
   Many of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, however, he's expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism, to a sometimes playful postmodernism.
   Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he's gradually moved from the political left towards the right. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democrático (FREDEMO) coalition, advocating neoliberal reforms. He has subsequently supported moderate conservative candidates.

Early life and family

Mario Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family of mestizo descent on March 28, 1936, in the Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta, who separated a few months before his birth. Shortly after Mario's birth, his father revealed that he was having an affair with a German woman; consequently, Mario has two younger half-brothers: Enrique and Ernesto Vargas.
   Vargas Llosa lived with his maternal family in Arequipa until a year after his parents' divorce, when his maternal grandfather was named honorary consul for Peru in Bolivia. As a child, Vargas Llosa was led to believe that his father had died—his mother and her family didn't want to explain that his parents had separated. During the government of Peruvian President José Bustamante y Rivero, Vargas Llosa's maternal grandfather obtained a diplomatic post in the Peruvian coastal city of Piura and the entire family returned to Peru. In 1946, at the age of ten, he moved to Lima and met his father for the first time. While in Lima, he studied at the Colegio La Salle, a Christian middle school, from 1947 to 1949.
   When Vargas Llosa was fourteen, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima. A year before his graduation, Vargas Llosa began working as an amateur journalist for local newspapers. He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper, La Industria, and witnessed the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, La huida del Inca.
   In 1953, during the government of Manuel A. Odría, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima's National University of San Marcos to study law and literature. He married Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle's sister-in-law, in 1955 at the age of 19; she was 13 years older. Upon his graduation from the National University of San Marcos in 1958, he received a scholarship to study at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. In 1960, after his scholarship in Madrid had expired, Vargas Llosa moved to France under the impression that he'd receive a scholarship to study there; however, upon arriving in Paris, he learned that his scholarship request was denied. Despite Mario and Julia's unexpected financial status, the couple decided to remain in Paris where he began to write prolifically. A year later, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, This early piece gained wide public attention and immediate success. Its vitality and adept use of sophisticated literary techniques immediately impressed critics, and it won the Premio de la Crítica Española award. This novel alone accumulated enough awards to place the author among the leading figures of the Latin American Boom. Indeed, Latin American literary critic Gerald Martin suggests that The Green House is "one of the greatest novels to have emerged from Latin America". A random meeting at a dog pound leads the pair to a riveting conversation at a nearby bar known as "The Cathedral". During the encounter, Zavala searches for the truth about his father's role in the murder of a notorious Peruvian underworld figure, shedding light on the workings of a dictatorship along the way. Unfortunately for Zavala, his quest results in a dead end with no answers and no sign of a better future. The novel attacks the dictatorial government of Odría by showing how a dictatorship controls and destroys lives. Although Vargas Llosa wrote this book-length study about his then friend, Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, they've not spoken to each other in more than 30 years. In 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face in Mexico City at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, ending the friendship. Neither writer has publicly stated the underlying reasons for the quarrel. A photograph of García Márquez sporting a black eye was published in 2007, reigniting public interest in the feud. Despite the decades of silence, In 2007, Vargas Llosa agreed to allow part of his book to be used as the introduction to a 40th-anniversary edition of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America that year.
   Following the monumental work Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa's output shifted away from more serious themes such as politics and problems with society. Latin American literary scholar Raymond L. Williams describes this phase in his writing career as "the discovery of humor". His first attempt at a satirical novel was Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleón y las visitadoras), published in 1973. This short, comic novel offers vignettes of dialogues and documents about the Peruvian armed forces and a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas. These plot elements are similar to Vargas Llosa's earlier novel The Green House; it's just that the form has changed. As such, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is essentially a parody of both The Green House and the literary approach that novel represents.
   From 1974 to 1987, Vargas Llosa focused on his writing, but also took the time to pursue other endeavors. In 1975, he co-directed a motion-picture adaptation of his novel, Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service.
   In 1977, Vargas Llosa published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor), based in part on his marriage to his first wife, Julia Urquidi, to whom he dedicated the novel. She later wrote a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say), in which she gives her personal account of their relationship. She states that Vargas Llosa's account exaggerates many negative points in their courtship and marriage while minimizing her role of assisting his literary career. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is considered one of the most striking examples of how the language and imagery of popular culture can be used in literature. The novel was adapted in 1990 into a Hollywood feature film, Tune in Tomorrow.

Later novels

Vargas Llosa's fourth major novel, The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo), was published in 1981 and was his first attempt at a historical novel. This work initiated a radical change in Vargas Llosa's style towards themes such as messianism and irrational human behaviour. It recreates the War of Canudos, an incident in 19th-century Brazil in which an armed millenarian cult held off a siege by the national army for months. As in Vargas Llosa's earliest work, this novel carries a sober and serious theme, and its tone is dark. Because of book's ambition and execution, critics have argued that this is one of Vargas Llosa's greatest literary pieces. The book was also criticized as revolutionary and anti-socialist.
After completing The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa began to write novels that were significantly shorter than many of his earlier books. In 1983, he finished The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Historia de Mayta, 1984). The Commission's main purpose was to investigate the murders in order to provide information regarding the incident to the public. Following his involvement with the Investigatory Commission, Vargas Llosa published a series of articles to defend his position in the affair. The experience also inspired one of Vargas Llosa's later novels, Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes), originally published in 1993 in Barcelona. Based on the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who governed the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, the novel has three main strands: one concerns Urania Cabral, the daughter of a former politician and Trujillo loyalist, who returns for the first time since leaving the Dominican Republic after Trujillo's assassination 30 years earlier; the second concentrates on the assassination itself, the conspirators who carry it out, and its consequences; and the third and final strand deals with Trujillo himself in scenes from the end of his regime. and has had a significant impact in Latin America, being regarded as one of Vargas Llosa's best works. In Vargas Llosa's version, the plot relates the decades-long obsession of its narrator, a Peruvian expatriate, with a woman with whom he first fell in love when both were teenagers.

Later life and political involvement

Like many other Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. He studied Marxism in depth as a university student and was later persuaded by communist ideals after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Gradually, Vargas Llosa came to believe that Cuban socialism was incompatible with what he considered to be general liberties and freedoms. The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred with the so-called Padilla Affair, when Fidel Castro imprisoned the poet Herberto Padilla. Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote to Castro protesting against the Cuban political system and the imprisonment of the artist. Vargas Llosa has identified himself with neoliberalism rather than extreme left-wing political ideologies ever since. Since he relinquished his earlier leftism, he's opposed both left- and right-wing authoritarian regimes.
With his appointment to the Investigatory Commission in 1983 he experienced what literary critic Jean Franco calls "the most uncomfortable event in [his] political career". Unfortunately for Vargas Llosa, his involvement with the Investigatory Commission led to immediate negative reactions and defamation from the Peruvian press; many suggested that the massacre was a conspiracy to keep the journalists from reporting the presence of government paramilitary forces in Uchuraccay. These conclusions, and Vargas Llosa personally, came under intense criticism: anthropologist Enrique Mayer, for instance, accused him of "paternalism", while fellow anthropologist Carlos Iván Degregori criticized him for his ignorance of the Andean world. Vargas Llosa was accused of actively colluding in a government cover-up of army involvement in the massacre. Shocked both by the atrocity itself and then by the reaction his report had provoked, Vargas Llosa responded that his critics were apparently more concerned with his report than with the hundreds of peasants who would later die at the hands of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla organization. Over the course of the decade, Vargas Llosa became known for his staunch neoliberal views. In 1987, he helped form and soon became a leader of the Movimiento Libertad. The following year his party entered a coalition with the parties of Peru's two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaúnde Terry (of the Popular Action party) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (of the Partido Popular Cristiano), to form the tripartite center-right coalition known as Frente Democrático (FREDEMO). During the campaign, his opponents read racy passages from his novels over the radio in an apparent attempt to shock voters. Although he won the first round with 34% of the vote, Vargas Llosa was defeated by a then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori, in the subsequent run-off. Since his political defeat, he's focused mainly on his writing, with only an occasional political involvement.
Vargas Llosa has mainly lived in London since the 1990s, but spends roughly three months of the year in Peru. In 1994 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy) He continues to write, both journalism and fiction, and to travel extensively. He has also taught as a visiting professor at a number of prominent universities.

Style

Plot, setting, and major themes

Vargas Llosa's style encompasses historical material as well as his own personal experiences. For example, in his first novel, The Time of the Hero, his own experiences at the Leoncio Prado military school informed his depiction of the corrupt social institution which mocked the moral standards it was supposed to uphold. For example, his two-volume novel Conversation in the Cathedral is based on the tyrannical dictatorship of Peruvian President Manuel A. Odría. The protagonist, Santiago, rebels against the suffocating dictatorship by participating in the subversive activities of leftist political groups. In addition to themes such as corruption and oppression, Vargas Llosa's second novel, The Green House, explores "a denunciation of Peru's basic institutions", dealing with issues of abuse and exploitation of the workers in the brothel by corrupt military officers. His responsibilities as a writer and lecturer have allowed him to travel frequently and led to settings for his novels in regions outside of Peru. The novel was characteristically realist, and Vargas Llosa underscores that he "respected the basic facts, [.. .] I've not exaggerated", but at the same time he points out "It's a novel, not a history book, so I took many, many liberties."
One of Vargas Llosa's more recent novels, The Way to Paradise (El paraíso en la otra esquina), is set largely in France and Tahiti. Based on the biography of former social reformer Flora Tristan, it demonstrates how Flora and Paul Gauguin were unable to find paradise, but were still able to inspire followers to keep working towards a socialist utopia. Unfortunately, Vargas Llosa wasn't as successful in transforming these historical figures into fiction. Some critics, such as Barbara Mujica, argue that The Way to Paradise lacks the "audacity, energy, political vision, and narrative genius" that was present in his previous works.

Modernism and postmodernism

The works of Mario Vargas Llosa are viewed as both modernist and postmodernist novels. Though there's still much debate over the differences between modernist and postmodernist literature, literary scholar M. Keith Booker claims that the difficulty and technical complexity of Vargas Llosa's early works, such as The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, are clearly elements of the modern novel. These novels have a much lighter, farcical, and comic tone, characteristics of postmodernism. This technique is a staple of his repertoire, which he began using near the end of his first novel, The Time of the Hero. However, he doesn't use interlacing dialogues in the same way in all of his novels. For example, in The Green House the technique is used in a serious fashion to achieve a sober tone and to focus on the interrelatedness of important events separated in time or space. In contrast, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service employs this strategy for comic effects and uses simpler spatial shifts. This device is similar to both Virginia Woolf's mixing of different characters' soliloquies and Gustave Flaubert's counterpoint technique in which he blends together conversation with other events, such as speeches. As a young writer, he looked to these revolutionary novelists in search of new narrative structures and techniques in order to delineate a more contemporary, multifaceted experience of urban Peru. He was looking for a style different from the traditional descriptions of land and rural life made famous by Peru's foremost novelist at the time, José María Arguedas. Vargas Llosa wrote of Arguedas's work that it was "an example of old-fashioned regionalism that had already exhausted its imaginary possibilities". Indeed, he's published a book-length study on his work, La utopía arcaica (1996).
Rather than restrict himself to Peruvian literature, Vargas Llosa also looked abroad for literary inspiration. Two French figures, existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and novelist Gustave Flaubert, influenced both his technique and style. Sartre's influence is most prevalent in Vargas Llosa's extensive use of conversation. The epigraph of The Time of the Hero, his first novel, is also taken directly from Sartre's work. Flaubert's artistic independence—his novels' disregard of reality and morals—has always been admired by Vargas Llosa, who wrote a book-length study of Flaubert's aesthetics, The Perpetual Orgy. In his analysis of Flaubert, Vargas Llosa questions the revolutionary power of literature in a political setting; this is in contrast to his earlier view that "literature is an act of rebellion", thus marking a transition in Vargas Llosa's aesthetic beliefs. Vargas Llosa considers Faulkner "the writer who perfected the methods of the modern novel". Both writers' styles include intricate changes in time and narration.
In addition to the studis of Arguedas and Flaubert, Vargas Llosa has written literary criticisms of other authors that he's admired, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean Paul Sartre. critic Sara Castro-Klarén argues that he offers little systematic analysis of these authors' literary techniques.

Legacy

Mario Vargas Llosa is considered a major Latin American writer, alongside other greats such as Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Indeed, for the literary critic Gerald Martin, writing in 1987, Vargas Llosa was "perhaps the most successful [.. . and] certainly the most controversial Latin American novelist of the past twenty-five years".
Most of Vargas Llosa's narratives have been translated into multiple languages, marking his international critical success. He is recognized among those who have most consciously promoted literature in general, and more specifically the novel itself, as avenues for meaningful commentary about life. During his prolific career, he's written more than a dozen novels and many other books and stories, and, for decades, he's been a voice for Latin American literature. He has won numerous awards for his writing, from the 1959 Premio Leopoldo Alas and the 1962 Premio Biblioteca Breve to the 1993 Premio Planeta (for Death in the Andes) and the Jerusalem Prize in 1995. The most important distinction he's received is probably the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, usually considered the most important accolade in Spanish-language literature and awarded to authors whose "work has contributed to enrich, in a notable way, the literary patrimony of the Spanish language".
A number of Vargas Llosa's works have been adapted for the screen, including The Time of the Hero and Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (both by the distinguished Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi) and The Feast of the Goat (by Vargas Llosa's cousin, Luis Llosa). Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was turned into the English-language film, Tune in Tomorrow. The Feast of the Goat has also been adapted as a theatrical play by Jorge Alí Triana, a Colombian playwright and director.

List of selected works

Fiction

1959 – Los jefes (The Cubs and Other Stories, 1979)
1963 – La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1966)
1966 – La casa verde (The Green House, 1968)
1969 – Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975)
1973 – Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978)
1977 – La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982)
1981 – La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1984)
1984 – Historia de Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1985)
1986 – ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987)
1987 – El hablador (The Storyteller, 1989)
1988 – Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990)
1993 – Lituma en los Andes (Death in the Andes, 1996)
1997 – Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998)
2000 – La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2002)
2003 – El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003)
2006 – Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl, 2007)

Non-fiction
1971 – García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (García Márquez: Story of a Deicide)
1975 – La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y "Madame Bovary" (The Perpetual Orgy)
1990 – La verdad de las mentiras: ensayos sobre la novela moderna (A Writer's Reality)
1993 – El pez en el agua. Memorias (A Fish in the Water)
1996 – La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo
1997 – Cartas a un joven novelista (Letters to a Young Novelist)
2001 – El lenguaje de la pasión (The Language of Passion)
2004 – La tentación de lo imposible (The Temptation of the Impossible)
2007 – El Pregón de Sevilla (as Introduction for LOS TOROS)

Drama

1952 – La huida del inca

1981 – La señorita de Tacna Vargas Llosa's essays and journalism have been collected as Contra viento y marea, issued in three volumes (1983, 1986, and 1990). A selection has been edited by John King and translated and published as Making Waves.

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