In his Nobel Speech, Mario Vargas Llosa called literature “a protest against the insufficiencies of life”. The late Peruvian writer—who wrote over 50 works of fiction, nonfiction and drama before his death earlier this month—was thus a constant and committed rebel. Vargas Llosa, who grew up under military dictatorship, believed that literature was not only an escape from reality, but a way to change it.
For more than six decades, Vargas Llosa used the written word to criticise the political order in Peru and across the world. His novels brought him the pedestal of fame, the dais of the public intellectual, and even the platform to run for president. Whether writing, opining or campaigning, he stood in defiance of the world’s shortcomings.
Vargas Llosa’s great motif was freedom—especially its erosion by the powers of tyranny and dictatorship. This commitment was literary, political and personal: in 1948, when he was 12, the military seized power in Peru and overthrew the elected president, a distant relative. Vargas Llosa’s political views may later have swung from communism to classical liberalism, as well as a late dalliance with the libertarian right, but he remained devoted to the cause of liberty—however he saw it.
Power, arbitrarily exercised, was central to his remarkable debut La ciudad y los perros (1963), known in English as The Time of the Hero. Set in a boarding school run by the military (the same one Vargas Llosa had himself attended in the 1950s), the novel is a fierce critique of institutional interests, corruption and the asphyxiations of martial culture. Its literary features, especially its manipulation of time and perspective, reflect the novel’s theme and milieu—and leave the reader feeling beset by oppressive forces.
Whereas The Time of the Hero examined the effects of the dictatorship on a small (and somewhat privileged) section of Peru, in Conversation in The Cathedral (1969) Vargas Llosa widened his lens to explore its impact on society at large. The conversation of the title is a reminiscence between a journalist (who, like Vargas Llosa, had been active in leftist student politics in the 1950s) and his father’s chauffeur. The result is a retrospective “state of the nation” novel (in the first paragraph, the narrator asks: “At what point had Peru fucked itself up?”).
Vargas Llosa’s fiction took a lighter turn in the 1970s, with novels such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service and the autofictional Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. This shift in Vargas Llosa’s writing came as he began to question, and then to condemn, communism. Leftism and literature had been his response to Peru’s dictatorship, but during a visit to the USSR in 1968 he realised that, had he been a Soviet citizen, he would have been sent to the gulag.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Vargas Llosa read the canonical writers of classical liberalism—such as Friedrich August von Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin—and was converted. He described his new philosophy as “an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect, a love for culture, a desire to coexist with others and a firm defense of freedom as a supreme value”.
Vargas Llosa led a centre-right coalition that opposed a plan to nationalise Peru’s banks
In 1990, these principles motivated him to campaign for the presidency of Peru. Believing, as per Hayek, that the free market protected individual and civil liberties, Vargas Llosa led a centre-right, economically liberal coalition that opposed a plan to nationalise the country’s banks. He narrowly won the first round, but lost resoundingly in the run-off to the outsider (and soon-to-be autocrat) Alberto Fujimori.
Fujimori, who was convicted of crimes against humanity in 2009, was one of the inspirations for Vargas Llosa’s most popular work, The Feast of the Goat (2000). The novel describes the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1891–1961), the brutal leader of the Dominican Republic. Mixing history with fiction (and personal scores), The Feast of the Goat is an intense and horrifying novel that begins when Urania Cabral—who was forced to flee the country when she was 14—returns 35 years after Trujillo’s assassination.
The Feast of the Goat took Vargas Llosa from Nobel candidate to winner-in-waiting. When the Swedish Academy finally called in 2010, it cited “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. Vargas Llosa described the prize as “a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year”.
In his latter years, living in Spain, Vargas Llosa became famous for his taste in upmarket restaurants and presence at fashionable parties. To the derision of his leftist critics, he was inducted into the Spanish nobility by King Juan Carlos and given the title of marquess. He also entered into a relationship with Isabel Preysler, the mother of the singer Enrique Iglesias. Vargas Llosa, it could be said, switched from socialist to socialite.
He kept writing (Harsh Times, published in 2019, is of particular note), and also opining. His unwavering belief in the free market led him to endorse reactionary political figures such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s Javier Milei. In the Peruvian election of 2021, he even supported Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of his longtime political adversary.
Vargas Llosa’s career was one in which politics and prose were intertwined, and he constantly sought new—and unfashionable—directions for himself and for the world. As he implied in his Nobel Speech, he was a writer for whom life was truly insufficient.
