What I remember most from my many interviews with Mario Vargas Llosa

Miami Herald

15-04-2025

When I once asked Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa how he wanted to be remembered after his death, he told me, 'I have done many things in my life, but I would like to be remembered mainly for my literature.' Fair enough — he was one of the greatest Spanish-language writers of all time.
But many of us will also remember the Peruvian-born novelist, who died April 13 in Lima at age 89, for his political activism in support of fundamental freedoms. He was one of the most politically-active, best-selling authors in recent times, whether that meant criticizing the dictators of Cuba and Venezuela or President Trump's threats to democracy in the United States.
Unlike many famous people who fear antagonizing part of their audiences, Vargas Llosa always spoke his mind. He understood better than most that the big ideological battle nowadays is not between right and left, but between democracy and dictatorship.
He was also one of the most courageous intellectuals I have known, often taking personal risks to support his causes. In 2014, when he was 78, he traveled to Venezuela to support the opposition against the Nicolás Maduro regime. He had already traveled to Venezuela in 2009, and was briefly detained at the airport by the regime of Hugo Chavez.
In 2011, when he visited Argentina to speak at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, protesters who were angry about his criticism of the Nestor Kirchner government threw objects at the bus where he was being transported to the event. He was not hurt.
In one of more than half a dozen interviews with him over the years, when he was 83, I asked him what his secret was to remain fully active, and why he was taking so much time and so many personal risks to support his political causes.
At his age, with his fame, he could be spending his time traveling around the world receiving honorary degrees and giving speeches wherever he wanted, I commented to him, only half-jokingly. He answered that it was part of his philosophy of remaining active on all fronts until the last day of his life.
'This is a way of life that, for me, is deeply stimulating,' Vargas Llosa told me. 'I don't get tired, even when I get tired, because I have the incentives to stay alive.'
Retirement was never an option for him. 'Perhaps the saddest spectacle I've seen has been the people who stop living while they're still alive. That seems something terrible to me,' he told me. Death should come as something unexpected, 'a surprise' in the normal course of one's life, he said.
When I asked him what he meant by that, he told me the story attributed to ancient Greece's great philosopher Socrates.
Cautioning that he didn't know whether the story was true, 'but it's a wonderful story,' he told me that when the soldiers went to carry out Socrates' death sentence by forcing him to drink hemlock, Socrates was learning Persian. When somebody said to him, 'But they're going to kill you,' Socrates responded: 'Yes, but I'd like to die learning Persian.'
Vargas Llosa added, 'It's a wonderful case in which death appears as an accident that interrupts a life that is in its fullness. I would like to die with a pen in my hand.'
He told me he worked seven days a week, especially in the mornings. He never opened a Twitter account, and struggled with technology. 'I'm one of the last writers who still writes with ink and paper,' he said.
When I asked him if his literature was mostly the product of talent or discipline, he answered it was discipline. 'I discovered from a very young age that I wasn't a genius, and that I had to replace my lack of genius with discipline, with work, with obstinacy .'
Vargas Llosa will no doubt be remembered, as he wanted, as an extraordinary writer. But many of us will never forget his support for democracy and freedoms around the world. We will miss you, Mario!
Don't miss the 'Oppenheimer Presenta' TV show on Sundays at 9 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Blog: andresoppenheimer.com