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Mario Vargas Llosa

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Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa in 2005
Born (1936-03-28) March 28, 1936 (age 88)
Arequipa, Peru
NationalityPeruvian, Spanish
Occupation(s)Writer, Journalist, Essayist, Politician
Spouse(s)Julia Urquidi (1955–1964)
Patricia Llosa (1965–present)
ChildrenÁlvaro
Gonzalo
Morgana
Parent(s)Ernesto Vargas Maldonado
Dora Llosa Ureta
Websitehttp://www.mvargasllosa.com/

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist and essayist. Vargas Llosa is not only considered to be one of Latin America's leading novelists and essayist, but also one of the leading authors of his generation. He has continued to write prolifically, and is considered to have a greater international impact and world-wide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom.[1]

Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero), La casa verde (The Green House), and the monumental Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral). His novels span many literary genres, including comedy, murder mystery, history, and political thriller. Several, such as Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor, have been adapted as feature films (the latter as Tune in Tomorrow).

Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career, and has 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, as the center-right FREDEMO coalition candidate, advocating neoliberal reforms. Subsequently, he has supported conservative-moderate candidates.

Vargas Llosa now lives in Madrid and London, but spends roughly three months of the year in his native Peru.[2] He has been married twice, and his children include the writer Álvaro Vargas Llosa.

Early life and family

Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in the Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa to a middle class family of Spanish descent. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta, but his parents separated a couple of months before his birth.[3] There are many speculations on why Mario's parent's separated, including the social inferiority of Ernesto Vargas to the Llosa family and the mistreatment and oppression of Dora Llosa by Ernesto.[4] When Dora Llosa returned to Arequipa in 1935, pregnant with Mario, Ernesto Vargas ignored her presence and filed for divorce. A few months after Mario's birth, Ernesto revealed an affair with a German woman, with whom he had two children, Mario's two half brothers, Enrique and Ernesto Vargas.[5]

Mario 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. Mario, his mother, and her family then moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he spent his childhood.[3] His maternal family, the Llosas, were sustained by his grandfather who also managed a cotton farm.[6] While growing up in Cochabamba, his mother and her family told him that his father had died, not that his parents had separated.[7] During the government of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, his paternal grandfather obtained an important political post in the Peruvian coastal city of Piura, which prompted Vargas Llosa and his mother to return to Peru near his grandfather and study in the Colegio Salesiano. In 1946, at the age of ten, Vargas Llosa moved to Lima and met his father for the first time.[8] His parents reestablished their relationship and lived in Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb, during his teenage years.[9] While in Lima he studied at the Colegio La Salle.[10] When Vargas Llosa was 14, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima where he claims to have gained inspiration for writing the novel La ciudad y los perros.[11]

A year before his graduation, Vargas Llosa was already working as an amateur journalist for various local newspapers.[12] He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper, La Industria, and where the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, La Huida del Inca, took place.

During the government of Manuel A. Odría in 1953, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima's National University of San Marcos to study law and literature.[13] In 1955, at the age of 19, he married Julia Urquidi, his uncle's sister-in-law; he was 13 years younger than her.[12] Vargas Llosa began his literary career in 1957 with the publication of his first short stories, Los jefes and El abuelo.[14] He graduated from San Marcos in 1958, and in the same year he received a scholarship to study at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain.[15] In 1960, after his scholarship in Madrid had expired, Vargas Llosa moved to France under the impression he would receive a scholarship to study there; however, after he arrived in Paris he found out he wouldn't be receiving one.[16] Despite their poor economic status, Mario and Julia decided to remain in Paris where he was able to begin writing prolifically.[16] Their marriage only lasted for a few more years, and in 1964 they divorced.[17] A year later, in 1965, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa.[17]

Major works

The Time of the Hero

Main article: The Time of the Hero

Vargas Llosa first came to wide public attention as a writer in 1963 with La Ciudad y Los Perros (whose title literally means "The City and the Dogs," though the book has been translated into English as The Time of the Hero, 1966). The book is set among a community of cadets in a Lima military school and is based on the author's personal experiences at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy;[18] although the use of narrative time, aspects of the plot and the development of one of the main characters were all influenced by Vargas Llosa's favourite William Faulkner novel, Light in August.[19] The novel also shows the influence of the existentialist works of Jean-Paul Sartre, and quotes a dialogue from one of his novels at the beginning of each of its two parts. This novel established what would become the main theme of Vargas Llosa's narrative: the individual's struggle for freedom within an oppressive reality.[20] The book immediately impressed critics due to its vitality and adept usage of sophisticated literary technique.[21]

The Green House

Main article: The Green House

Vargas Llosa followed La Ciudad y Los Perros by writing La casa verde (The Green House, 1966), a novel that shows the considerable influence that William Faulkner had on the budding writer.[22] Some critics still consider this book to be Vargas Llosa's finest and most important achievement.[22] The novel deals with a brothel called the Green House, and how its quasi-mythical presence affects the lives of the characters. The main plot follows Bonifacia, a girl who is about to receive the vows of the church, and the transformation that will lead her to become la Selvatica, the best known prostitute of the Green House. The novel immediately received enthusiastic critical reception, confirming Vargas Llosa in his position as an important voice of Latin American narrative.[23] The Green House went on to win the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967, out-voting works by the veteran Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti and by Gabriel García Márquez.[24] This novel alone accumulated enough awards to place the author amongst the leading figures of the Latin-American boom at the time.[22]

Conversation in the Cathedral

Main article: Conversation in the Cathedral

At the age of 33, Vargas Llosa completed his third novel, which critics considered his most valuable narrative cycle as well as his most overtly political novel.[25] Published in two volumes, Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) was Vargas Llosa's first attempt at what he calls a "total novel," that is, the depiction of all the levels of a society through fiction.[26] The novel is a portrayal of Peru under the dictatorship of Odría in the 1950s, and deals with the lives of characters from different social strata.[27] The ambitious narrative is built around the stories of Santiago Zavala and Ambrosio respectively; one the son of a minister, the other his chauffeur.[28] A random meeting at a dog pound leads to a riveting conversation between the two at a nearby bar known as the Cathedral (hence the title).[29] During the encounter Zavala tries to find 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 improved future.[30]. This hopelessness allows for Conversation in the Cathedral to emerge as Vargas Llosa's most bitter novel.[30]

The War of the End of the World

Main article: The War of the End of the World

La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), published in 1981, is a fictional recreation of 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.[31] However, The War of the End of the World is not directly based on the real historical events; rather its main inspiration is the non-fiction account of those events published by Euclides da Cunha in 1902.[31] Similar to his earlier work, this novel carries with it a sober and serious theme, with an overall dark tone.[31] Vargas Llosa's bold exploration of the propensity of humanity to idealize violence, the comprehensions of war, and a man-made catastrophe brought on from the unexpected consequences of fanaticism, has earned La guerra del fin del mundo not only the recognition of his most ambitious and accomplished theme, but also, as considered by some critics, his greatest work of literature.[32]

The Feast of the Goat

A translation of The Feast of the Goat
Main article: The Feast of the Goat

La Fiesta del Chivo,(The Feast of the Goat) is Mario Vargas Llosa's most complete, most ambitious, and longest novel since The War at the End of the World.[33] Published in 2000, it is based on the historical dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who governed the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.[33] Despite not being entirely accurate in a historical sense, Vargas Llosa employs literary realism throughout this novel; in fact, while describing The Feast of the Goat, he said, "I didn't invent anything that couldn't have happened."[34] The novel has three main strands: one concerns Urania Cabral, daughter of a former political figure and Trujillo loyalist, who returns for the first time since leaving the Dominican Republic after Tujillo's assassination thirty years previously; the second strand 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.[33]

La Fiesta del Chivo quickly received positive reviews in both Spain and Latin America.[35] This novel has had a significant impact on the Latin-American world and is regarded as one of Vargas Llosa's best pieces of work.[33]

Other works

Vargas Llosa followed his monumental work Conversación en la catedral with the shorter and much more comic Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1972), which, through a series of vignettes of dialogues and documents, follows the establishment by the Peruvian armed forces of a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas.[36] These aspects of the plot are extremely similar to those of one of Vargas Llosa's earlier novels, The Green House; in fact, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is basically a parody of both The Green House itself, as well as the literary approach that novel represents.[36]

In 1977 Vargas Llosa published La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), based in part on his first marriage to his first wife, Julia Urquidi, to whom he dedicated the novel.[37] She later wrote a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say) in which she gave her own version of their relationship, stating how Vargas Llosa exaggerated many negative points in their courtship and marriage and minimized her role in assisting his literary career in his mock autobiography.[38] La tia Julia y el escribidor is considered to be one of the most striking examples of how language and imagery of pop culture is used in literature.[39] Subsequently, Vargas Llosa's novel has been adapted into a Hollywood feature film, Tune in Tomorrow.

Vargas Llosa's most recent novel, Travesuras de la niña mala (2006), 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.

Style

Vargas Llosa's novels cover many different literary genres, including comedy (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service),[36] crime fiction (Who Killed Palomino Molero?),[40] the historical novel (The War of the End of the World),[31] the political thriller (The Feast of the Goat),[33] and erotic literature (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto). His writing style often includes intricate changes in time and narrator, similar to that of American novelist William Faulkner, whom Vargas Llosa acknowledges as an extremely important literary influence.[41]

Mario Vargas Llosa's novels are considered to fall under the category of both modernist and postmodernist works.[42] His early works, such as, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral seem to be of a modernist vein; however, his later texts, including, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and The Storyteller appear to follow a postmodernist mode of writing.[43] Moreover, his earlier work seems to have a more serious, complex and fragmented tone, compared to a more farcical, simplistic one that is generally found in his later novels.[44] Vargas Llosa has been commended for his ability to combine both complex writing structures with simplistic themes into his works.[45]

Vargas Llosa constantly uses the technique of interlacing dialogs throughout the majority of his novels.[46] By combining two conversations that occurred at different times, this technique creates the illusion of a flashback (shifting time). Moreover, Vargas Llosa sometimes uses this technique as a means of shifting location, rather than time, by weaving together two conversations that are taking place at the same time, but in different places.[47]

Many of his works are based on historical events and his personal experiences.[48] Most of Vargas Llosa's novels embody traditional themes that surround the conflictive nature of the characters and the illustration and interrelation of the different cultural, socio-economic, and political aspects of Peruvian and Latin American Society.[49] Many of his earlier novels were set in Peru.[40] However, in more recent novels he has expanded to other regions of Latin-America, such as Brazil and the Dominican Republic. One of his more recent novels El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise (2003)) is set largely in France and Tahiti.[50]

Political involvement

Like many Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro.[23] However, he eventually became disenchanted with the policies of the Cuban government and moved considerably to the right.[51][52] Ever since he detached himself from communist ideals, he has opposed both left and right wing authoritarian regimes.[53]

File:Fredemo-vargasllosa.jpg
Vargas Llosa 1990 election poster

During the 1980s, Vargas Llosa became increasingly politically active in his native country, and became known for his staunch neoliberal views. In 1987, he helped form and soon became leader of the Movimiento Libertad.[54] The following year his party entered into a coalition with the parties of Peru's two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaunde Terry (AP) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (PPC), to form the tripartite coalition known as Frente Democratico (FREDEMO).[54] He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the center-right FREDEMO coalition. He proposed a drastic austerity program that frightened most of the country's poor. This program emphasized the need for privatization, a market economy, free trade, and most importantly, the dissemination of private property.[2] During the campaign, his opponents read racy passages of his works 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.[2] His account of his run for the presidency was subsequently included in a memoir, published in an English-language translation (by Helen Lane) as A Fish in the Water.[55] Since his defeat, Vargas Llosa has focused mainly on his writing, with the occasional political involvement.[56]

After acquiring Spanish citizenship in 1993, Vargas Llosa has increasingly made Spain his home, spending less time in his native country of Peru.[57] In 1994 he was elected a member of the Spanish Royal Academy (Real Academia Española).[57] He has also been involved in the country's political arena. On February 2008, he stopped supporting the Partido Popular in favor of the recently created UPD, claiming that certain conservative views held by the former party go against his liberal beliefs. His political ideologies appear in the book Política razonable, written by himself along with Fernando Savater, Rosa Díez, Álvaro Pombo, Albert Boadella and Carlos Martínez Gorriarán.[58]

Personal life

Vargas Llosa has written a book-length study on Gabriel García Márquez, a onetime friend with whom he subsequently parted ways in 1976 when Vargas Llosa punched Garcia Marquez in the face in Mexico city at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.[59] A picture of Garcia Marquez's black eye was published in 2007.[60] Although he has not spoken to García Márquez since, Vargas Llosa recently agreed to allow part of this book to be used as the introduction to a new edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America.[61]

After the book, entitled García Márquez: historia de un deicidio, was published in 1971 in an edition of 20,000 copies, the initial edition quickly sold out; but despite great demand (and at least one pirated edition) Vargas Llosa refused to allow its republication for many years. The study was eventually included in a volume of his collected works in 2006. It has not been translated into English. He has also written book-length studies of Flaubert and of the Valencian writer Joanot Martorell. Vargas Llosa's discussion of his own novels is contained in A Writer's Reality (1991).

Vargas Llosa has taught at the Queen Mary College and King's College of the University of London, Washington State University (Pullman), the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras), at Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Georgetown University and at The City University of New York.[62]

Vargas Llosa lives primarily in London and Madrid, and recently became a Spanish citizen.[57] He has three children with his second wife, Patricia Llosa: Álvaro Vargas Llosa, a writer and editor; Gonzalo, a businessman; and Morgana, a photographer.

Legacy

Mario Vargas Llosa is known as one of the major writers in Latin American literature.[63] He is noted among other greats such as, Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes.[63] Indeed, for the literary critic Gerald Martin (writing in 1987), Vargas Llosa was "perhaps the most successful" as well as "certainly the most controversial Latin American novelist of the past twenty-five years."[64]

The majority of Vargas Llosa's narratives have been translated into multiple languages--marking his international critical success.[63] Vargas Llosa is also noted for his substantial career as a journalist, an accomplishment not characteristic of many other Latin American writers.[65] He is recognized among those who have most consciously promoted the embracing of both literature in general, and more specifically the novel itself, as avenues for meaningful commentary about life.[66] During his prolific career, he has written more than a dozen novels, as well as numerous other books and stories, has been a voice for Latin-American literature for decades, and has also been a Presidential candidate.[67] 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 Lituma en los Andes) and the Jerusalem Prize in 1995.[68] The most important distinction he has received to date has probably been the 1994 award of the Cervantes Prize, usually considered the most important prize in Spanish-language literature.

A number of Vargas Llosa's works have been adapted to the screen, including La ciudad y los perros, Pantaleón y los visitadores (both by the distinguished Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi) and La fiesta del chivo (by Vargas Llosa's own cousin, Luis Llosa).[69] The Feast of the Goat has also been adapted as a theatrical play by Jorge Alí Triana, a Colombian playwright and director.[70]

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Theatre

  • 1981 – La señorita de Tacna

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)

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

Notes

  1. ^ Boland & Harvey 1988, p. 7
  2. ^ a b c Parker 2007
  3. ^ a b Williams 2001, p. 17
  4. ^ Morote 1998, p. 12
  5. ^ Morote 1998, p. 14
  6. ^ Morote 1998, pp. 6–7
  7. ^ Williams 2001, p. 24
  8. ^ Williams 2001, p. 30
  9. ^ Williams 2001, p. 31
  10. ^ Williams 2001, p. 20
  11. ^ Vincent 2007, p. 2
  12. ^ a b Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 9
  13. ^ Williams 2001, p. 39
  14. ^ Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 21
  15. ^ Williams 2001, p. 44
  16. ^ a b Williams 2001, p. 45
  17. ^ a b Williams 2001, p. 54
  18. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 32
  19. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 34
  20. ^ Morote 1998, p. 66–67
  21. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 33
  22. ^ a b c Booker 1994, p. 6
  23. ^ a b Kristal 1998, p. xi
  24. ^ Armas 1991, p. 101
  25. ^ Rossman 1987, p. 493
  26. ^ Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 77
  27. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 56
  28. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 61
  29. ^ Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 80
  30. ^ a b Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 106
  31. ^ a b c d Booker 1994, p. 75
  32. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 124
  33. ^ a b c d e Williams 2001, p. 267 Cite error: The named reference "Williams267" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  34. ^ Williams 2001, p. 270
  35. ^ Williams 2001, p. 268
  36. ^ a b c Booker 1994, p. 33
  37. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 91
  38. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 221
  39. ^ Booker 1994, p. 54
  40. ^ a b Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 19
  41. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 26
  42. ^ Booker 1994, p. 32
  43. ^ Booker 1994, p. 3
  44. ^ Booker 1994, p. 35
  45. ^ Kristal 1998, p. 51
  46. ^ Booker 1994, p. 13
  47. ^ Booker 1994, p. 14
  48. ^ Booker 1994, p. 48
  49. ^ Fernández 1997, p. 9
  50. ^ Vargas Llosa 2003
  51. ^ Morote 1998, p. 234
  52. ^ Armas 1991, p. 109
  53. ^ Vincent 2007, p. 1
  54. ^ a b Boland & Harvey 1988, p. 8
  55. ^ Larsen 2000, p. 155
  56. ^ Williams 2001, p. 82
  57. ^ a b c Williams 2001, p. 83
  58. ^ "Escritor Mario Vargas Llosa retira su apoyo al PP y pide el voto para UPyD". Terra Actualidad (in Spanish). Retrieved 2008-03-22.
  59. ^ Armas 1991, p. 101
  60. ^ See Noam Cohen, "García Márquez’s Shiner Ends Its 31 Years of Quietude", New York Times (March 29, 2007) or here
  61. ^ Vincent 2007, p. 3
  62. ^ "Biographical Sketch". Mario Vargas Llosa Papers. Princeton University Library.
  63. ^ a b c Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 1
  64. ^ Martin 1987, p. 205
  65. ^ Castro-Klarén 1990, p. 2
  66. ^ Muñoz 2000, p. 2
  67. ^ Williams 2001, p. 84
  68. ^ "Vargas Llosa Wins The Jerusalem Prize". New York Times January 17, 1995. Retrieved 2008-03-20.
  69. ^ "Mario Vargas Llosa". The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2008-03-20.
  70. ^ Navarro 2003

References

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