Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa, in full Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa
(b. March 28, 1936, Arequipa, Peru), Peruvian writer whose
commitment to social change is evident in his novels, plays,
and essays. In 1990 he was an unsuccessful candidate for
president of Peru. Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel
Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of
power and his trenchant images of the individual’s
resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
Vargas Llosa received his
early education in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where his
grandfather was the Peruvian consul. He later attended a
series of schools in Peru before entering a military school,
Leoncio Prado, in Lima in 1950. His first published work was
La huida del Inca (1952; “The Escape of the Inca”), a
three-act play. Thereafter his stories began to appear in
Peruvian literary reviews, and he coedited Cuadernos de
composición (1956–57; “Composition Book”) and Literatura
(1958–59). He worked as a journalist and broadcaster and
attended the University of Madrid. In 1959 he moved to
Paris, where he lived until 1966.
Vargas Llosa’s first novel,
La ciudad y los perros (1963; “The City and the Dogs”; Eng.
trans. The Time of the Hero), was widely acclaimed.
Translated into more than a dozen languages, this novel, set
in the Leoncio Prado Military School, describes adolescents
striving for survival in a hostile and violent environment.
The corruption of the military school reflects the larger
malaise afflicting Peru. The book was filmed twice, in
Spanish (1985) and in Russian (1986), the second time as
Yaguar.
The novel La casa verde
(1966; The Green House), set in the Peruvian jungle,
combines mythical, popular, and heroic elements to capture
the sordid, tragic, and fragmented reality of its
characters. Los cachorros (1967; The Cubs, and Other
Stories, filmed 1973) is a psychoanalytical portrayal of an
adolescent who has been accidentally castrated. Conversación
en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral) deals
with Manuel Odría’s regime (1948–56). The novel Pantaleón y
las visitadoras (1973; “Pantaleón and the Visitors”; Eng.
trans. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, filmed 2000)
is a satire of the Peruvian military and religious
fanaticism. His semiautobiographical novel La tía Julia y el
escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, filmed
1990 as Tune in Tomorrow) combines two distinct narrative
points of view to provide a contrapuntal effect.
Vargas Llosa also wrote a
critical study of the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez in
García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (1971; “García
Márquez: Story of a God-Killer”), a study of Gustave
Flaubert in La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y “Madame Bovary”
(1975; The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary), and
a study of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in
Entre Sartre y Camus (1981; “Between Sartre and Camus”).
After living three years in
London, he was a writer-in-residence at Washington State
University in 1969. In 1970 he settled in Barcelona. He
returned to Lima in 1974 and lectured and taught widely
throughout the world. A collection of his critical essays in
English translation was published in 1978. La guerra del fin
del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World), an
account of the 19th-century political conflicts in Brazil,
became a best seller in Spanish-speaking countries. Three of
his plays—La señorita de Tacna (1981; The Young Lady of
Tacna), Kathie y el hipopotamo (1983; Kathie and the
Hippopotamus), and La chunga (1986; “The Jest”; Eng. trans.
La chunga)—were published in Three Plays (1990).
In 1990 Vargas Llosa lost
his bid for the presidency of Peru in a runoff against
Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer and the son of
Japanese immigrants. Vargas Llosa wrote about this
experience in El pez en el agua: memorias (1993; A Fish in
the Water: A Memoir). He became a citizen of Spain in 1993
and was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1994. Despite his new
nationality, he continued to write about Peru in such novels
as Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997; The Notebooks of
Don Rigoberto). His later works include the novels La fiesta
del chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat) and El paraíso en la
otra esquina (2003; The Way to Paradise), as well as the
nonfiction Cartas a un joven novelista (1997; Letters to a
Young Novelist) and El lenguaje de la pasión (2001; The
Language of Passion).
