Latest news with #ConversationintheCathedral
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Political Novelist Who Never Stood Still
'At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?' So begins the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's 1969 masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. What made the opening so famous and effective was the fact that many countries across Latin America, a landscape of shaky democracies, were asking themselves that question about their homeland. The number of people asking this seems to have grown in recent years all over the world. Perhaps you've asked it yourself. Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima this past weekend at the age of 89, nurtured a lifelong obsession with his native Peru: its corrupt political ecosystem, its inequality, its incapacity to make good on its promise. He dissected that obsession in many of his 30 novels. The answers he came up with never fully satisfied him, which only meant that he posed the question from another angle in the next book. I devoured his novels before and after emigrating from Mexico to the United States in the 1980s. For many of us Latin Americans, reading him was a way to demonstrate our investment in the region's future. His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic; what fascinated me just as much was the elasticity, over decades of profound change, of his politics. I got to know Vargas Llosa in his later years, after he had lost a run for president of Peru and won a Nobel Prize in Literature. He and I shared an agnostic attitude toward government. It is frequently said that doubt is the engine of intelligence, and he had a great deal of both. His omnivorous intellect went from one topic to another, exploring them in minute detail. Like most members of his generation—the authors of the so-called literary Latin American boom of the 1960s and '70s, which put the region on the cultural map—he entered adulthood as a Marxist. Indeed, his education was defined by the Cuban Revolution. In a part of the world where illiteracy runs rampant, he was convinced that writers aren't entertainers but spokespersons of the silent majority. That means that they must stand up to power. Not surprisingly, Vargas Llosa's early novels, inspired by the type of social realism that prevailed after the Second World War, are at their core antiauthoritarian. Because he had come of age under right-wing dictatorships, he believed that Peru's antidemocratic spirit was rooted in the inquisitorial habits brought over by the Europeans during the conquest. Underlying Conversation in the Cathedral is a critique of the regime of Manuel A. Odría, who was the president of Peru in the 1950s. [In the February 1984 issue: Latin America: A media stereotype] Over time, Vargas Llosa realized that this kind of reflexive leftism was naive. The turning point came in 1971, when the prominent Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned for speaking out against Fidel Castro's Communist regime, which by then had aligned itself with Moscow. While other 'Boomistas,' including Vargas Llosa's pal and onetime roommate Gabriel García Márquez, looked the other way, he ferociously denounced the curtailing of free speech. (He broke off contact with García Marquez in 1976 after punching his old friend in the face on the night of a film screening.) But Vargas Llosa didn't stop there. He also accused the Havana government of intolerance, allergy to free enterprise, and overall narrowmindedness. As a result, he quickly became a persona non grata in Latin American intellectual circles. This was the spark that his ferociously independent spirit needed, and it deepened his literary work. His move toward the ideological center is clear in The War of the End of the World, published in 1981—my favorite Vargas Llosa book. It is about a real-life religious fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro, in Brazil's 19th-century hinterlands, who established an autonomous republic made up of outlaws, sex workers, and beggars. The novel is a cautionary tale about populist leaders who are incapable of separating their need for adulation from the needs of their constituents. I read it almost in a single sitting when it came out. Vargas Llosa's absolute command of the craft made clear that a key role of the novelist is to use fiction to explain the excesses of power. But when, in 1990, he persuaded himself that he could be Peru's president, Vargas Llosa turned his own lessons upside down. Some critics called his campaign quixotic. There is a difference between quixotic and foolish. Throughout his run, he seemed like a fish out of water—an expression he played with for the title of the account he wrote, a few years later, about his misbegotten adventure. Not only did he lose embarrassingly, but he became a sort of avatar for Conselheiro, rallying the faithful less through reason than through charismatic fervor. He left Peru in a rush, having expeditiously secured a Spanish passport. His followers were furious. I myself thought he was a coward. We all stopped reading him. We were looking for answers to the quagmire that is Latin America, and they surely couldn't come from a buffoon. In Spain, however, Vargas Llosa again found a new calling. He continued meddling in politics, but more cautiously now. And he persevered in the art of the novel, although his audience was fractured (with the exception of his rapturously received 2000 novel, The Feast of the Goat, about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the tyrant of the Dominican Republic). His coup de grâce, and the reason I reached out to him, was the launch in 1990 of a syndicated column, 'Piedra de Toque' ('Touchstone'), for the Madrid newspaper El País and its various Latin American editions. This perch allowed Vargas Llosa to comment on just about every topic he fancied, including films and fashion. [Read: Vargas Llosa returns to his peaks] These were only appetizers, though. Politics was always his main course. The magic wasn't only in the style he perfected—that of a thinker digesting the contradictions of power—but in his shifting stances. In columns and speeches, he condemned the Muslim fundamentalists who conducted the Charlie Hebdo attacks and frequently assailed Vladimir Putin as a dictator. He traveled to Gaza and the West Bank, interviewing people involved with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His views on Zionism were nuanced, denouncing extremism on both sides. He believed in a two-state solution, although he could also be disheartened about its prospects. He referred to ours as 'the civilization of the spectacle.' The ideological metamorphoses Vargas Llosa went through are not so uncommon these days: from the left to the right and vice versa, from peaceful discourse to revolutionary rhetoric, from a democratic stand to the belief in a centralized power and back. Orthodoxies no longer hold, and extremes coexist. There is, in fact, nothing unpredictable in the author's evolution. Marxists end up ardent proponents of market economies, anti-colonialists mutate into eager interventionists, and nativists fall in love with cosmopolitanism. Most of us are more complex—and more interesting—than labels allow for. Vargas Llosa embodied those contradictions with pride, turning them into art. I wrote to thank Vargas Llosa for his reluctance to be pigeonholed. Even when I disagreed with him—I often did—I cherished his courage to offer alternative routes of thought. We became friends, emailing on a variety of topics. I had been meaning to write again about that famous opening of Conversation in the Cathedral when I found out (from the news, like most everyone else) that he had died. I'd wanted to ask him if Peru might be seen as a synecdoche for countries all over the world—then and now. In other words, could the question at the outset of the novel be applied today to the United States—a bastion of democratic strength being ripped apart by an erratic tyrant? Years ago, in one of his lucid columns, Vargas Llosa described the election of Donald Trump as a form of national suicide. Is Trump—I wanted to ask—like Odría, Trujillo, and Castro? In lieu of an answer, I recommend reading the novel again, now as a kind of surrogate fiction about a country in search of meaning, by a writer ready to confront our most pressing fears. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Political Novelist Who Never Stood Still
'At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?' So begins the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's 1969 masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. What made the opening so famous and effective was the fact that many countries across Latin America, a landscape of shaky democracies, were asking themselves that question about their homeland. The number of people asking this seems to have grown in recent years all over the world. Perhaps you've asked it yourself. Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima this past weekend at the age of 89, nurtured a lifelong obsession with his native Peru: its corrupt political ecosystem, its inequality, its incapacity to make good on its promise. He dissected that obsession in many of his 30 novels. The answers he came up with never fully satisfied him, which only meant that he posed the question from another angle in the next book. I devoured his novels before and after emigrating from Mexico to the United States in the 1980s. For many of us Latin Americans, reading him was a way to demonstrate our investment in the region's future. His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic; what fascinated me just as much was the elasticity, over decades of profound change, of his politics. I got to know Vargas Llosa in his later years, after he had lost a run for president of Peru and won a Nobel Prize in Literature. He and I shared an agnostic attitude toward government. It is frequently said that doubt is the engine of intelligence, and he had a great deal of both. His omnivorous intellect went from one topic to another, exploring them in minute detail. Like most members of his generation—the authors of the so-called literary Latin American boom of the 1960s and '70s, which put the region on the cultural map—he entered adulthood as a Marxist. Indeed, his education was defined by the Cuban Revolution. In a part of the world where illiteracy runs rampant, he was convinced that writers aren't entertainers but spokespersons of the silent majority. That means that they must stand up to power. Not surprisingly, Vargas Llosa's early novels, inspired by the type of social realism that prevailed after the Second World War, are at their core antiauthoritarian. Because he had come of age under right-wing dictatorships, he believed that Peru's antidemocratic spirit was rooted in the inquisitorial habits brought over by the Europeans during the conquest. Underlying Conversation in the Cathedral is a critique of the regime of Manuel A. Odría, who was the president of Peru in the 1950s. In the February 1984 issue: Latin America: A media stereotype Over time, Vargas Llosa realized that this kind of reflexive leftism was naive. The turning point came in 1971, when the prominent Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned for speaking out against Fidel Castro 's Communist regime, which by then had aligned itself with Moscow. While other 'Boomistas,' including Vargas Llosa's pal and onetime roommate Gabriel García Márquez, looked the other way, he ferociously denounced the curtailing of free speech. (He broke off contact with García Marquez in 1976 after punching his old friend in the face on the night of a film screening.) But Vargas Llosa didn't stop there. He also accused the Havana government of intolerance, allergy to free enterprise, and overall narrowmindedness. As a result, he quickly became a persona non grata in Latin American intellectual circles. This was the spark that his ferociously independent spirit needed, and it deepened his literary work. His move toward the ideological center is clear in The War of the End of the World, published in 1981—my favorite Vargas Llosa book. It is about a real-life religious fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro, in Brazil's 19th-century hinterlands, who established an autonomous republic made up of outlaws, sex workers, and beggars. The novel is a cautionary tale about populist leaders who are incapable of separating their need for adulation from the needs of their constituents. I read it almost in a single sitting when it came out. Vargas Llosa's absolute command of the craft made clear that a key role of the novelist is to use fiction to explain the excesses of power. But when, in 1990, he persuaded himself that he could be Peru's president, Vargas Llosa turned his own lessons upside down. Some critics called his campaign quixotic. There is a difference between quixotic and foolish. Throughout his run, he seemed like a fish out of water—an expression he played with for the title of the account he wrote, a few years later, about his misbegotten adventure. Not only did he lose embarrassingly, but he became a sort of avatar for Conselheiro, rallying the faithful less through reason than through charismatic fervor. He left Peru in a rush, having expeditiously secured a Spanish passport. His followers were furious. I myself thought he was a coward. We all stopped reading him. We were looking for answers to the quagmire that is Latin America, and they surely couldn't come from a buffoon. In Spain, however, Vargas Llosa again found a new calling. He continued meddling in politics, but more cautiously now. And he persevered in the art of the novel, although his audience was fractured (with the exception of his rapturously received 2000 novel, The Feast of the Goat, about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the tyrant of the Dominican Republic). His coup de grâce, and the reason I reached out to him, was the launch in 1990 of a syndicated column, ' Piedra de Toque ' ('Touchstone'), for the Madrid newspaper El País and its various Latin American editions. This perch allowed Vargas Llosa to comment on just about every topic he fancied, including films and fashion. These were only appetizers, though. Politics was always his main course. The magic wasn't only in the style he perfected—that of a thinker digesting the contradictions of power—but in his shifting stances. In columns and speeches, he condemned the Muslim fundamentalists who conducted the Charlie Hebdo attacks and frequently assailed Vladimir Putin as a dictator. He traveled to Gaza and the West Bank, interviewing people involved with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His views on Zionism were nuanced, denouncing extremism on both sides. He believed in a two-state solution, although he could also be disheartened about its prospects. He referred to ours as 'the civilization of the spectacle.' The ideological metamorphoses Vargas Llosa went through are not so uncommon these days: from the left to the right and vice versa, from peaceful discourse to revolutionary rhetoric, from a democratic stand to the belief in a centralized power and back. Orthodoxies no longer hold, and extremes coexist. There is, in fact, nothing unpredictable in the author's evolution. Marxists end up ardent proponents of market economies, anti-colonialists mutate into eager interventionists, and nativists fall in love with cosmopolitanism. Most of us are more complex—and more interesting—than labels allow for. Vargas Llosa embodied those contradictions with pride, turning them into art. I wrote to thank Vargas Llosa for his reluctance to be pigeonholed. Even when I disagreed with him—I often did—I cherished his courage to offer alternative routes of thought. We became friends, emailing on a variety of topics. I had been meaning to write again about that famous opening of Conversation in the Cathedral when I found out (from the news, like most everyone else) that he had died. I'd wanted to ask him if Peru might be seen as a synecdoche for countries all over the world—then and now. In other words, could the question at the outset of the novel be applied today to the United States—a bastion of democratic strength being ripped apart by an erratic tyrant? Years ago, in one of his lucid columns, Vargas Llosa described the election of Donald Trump as a form of national suicide. Is Trump—I wanted to ask—like Odría, Trujillo, and Castro? In lieu of an answer, I recommend reading the novel again, now as a kind of surrogate fiction about a country in search of meaning, by a writer ready to confront our most pressing fears.
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Mario Vargas Llosa obituary
Many Latin American writers have been tempted to take on a public role, but few have pursued this ambition as far as the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who in 1990 came close to being elected his country's president. Vargas Llosa, who has died aged 89, owed the possibility of high office almost entirely to his novels, which put him at the forefront of world writers for more than 50 years. His early works, such as The Green House (1966) or Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), firmly established him as one of the leading authors of what came to be known as the 'magical realism' school of writers, although in his case this was often more a question of novelistic technique than of any magical view of his country's history. He also developed a comic vein most evident in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) that also set him apart from other writers of the so-called 'boom' in Latin American fiction. Vargas Llosa said that the urge to write came from the unusual circumstances surrounding his childhood. Born in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, he was sent by his grandfather, with his mother, Dora Llosa, brothers and sisters, to live in neighbouring Bolivia when his father, Ernesto Vargas, abandoned the family. The young Mario grew up believing his father was dead. When he was 10 his mother presented him to a complete stranger, and told him this was his father. Ernesto rejoined the family, and they lived together in the Peruvian capital, Lima. Recalling this difficult relationship in his autobiography A Fish in the Water (1993), Vargas Llosa spoke of the 'social inferiority' his father felt towards his mother, and calls it 'the national disease … the one that infests every stratum and every family in the country and leaves them all with a bad aftertaste of hatred, poisoning the lives of Peruvians in the form of resentment and social complexes'. The rancorous complexities of Peruvian life were brought home still more forcefully to the adolescent Mario when at the age of 14 he was sent to a military academy. He hated the harsh discipline, but it enabled him to meet people from different backgrounds and regions. The experience formed the subject matter of his first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), and informed several of his later works. Vargas Llosa was well aware by now that it was literary rather than military glory that he was destined for. By the age of 16, he was working as a crime reporter on a daily newspaper, and at 19 he eloped with his much older aunt by marriage, Julia Urquidi, whom he married in 1955. Once again, he turned this to good literary effect in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, about a radio soap opera hack who finds it increasingly difficult to separate reality from his fictional creations. This was the only one of Vargas Lllosa's books to attract Hollywood's attention. William Boyd, the writer of the screenplay for the 1990 film (released in the US as Tune in Tomorrow), described the original as 'almost Swiftian, with a quality of fantasy that sees the world as lurid and absurd'. After graduating from the National University of San Marcos, Lima, in 1958, Vargas Llosa was living in Europe, either in Barcelona, London or Paris. At that time, the French capital was thronged with young Latin American writers – including Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes – and it was the French publishing houses who first created the boom in Latin American literature. The young Peruvian novelist was warmly welcomed as a member of this literary club. Vargas Llosa's novels of this period are closer to the realist tradition of the novel than to 'magical realism', providing as they do incisive descriptions of many levels of Peruvian society. The magic consisted in the novelist's skill of combining different narratives and voices without explicit connections, offering a rich complexity and suggesting a huge literary appetite. These early novels contained a sweeping criticism of the state of Peruvian and, more widely, Latin American society. The younger generation of writers took the political dimension of their work extremely seriously, and it was understood that they shared a leftwing viewpoint. Mario soon came to be seen as the odd man out. As so often, it was Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba that was the flashpoint. When Libre, a pan-Latin American magazine was launched in Paris, it was not long before Vargas Llosa, García Márquez and others quarrelled over whether to support Castro. Vargas Llosa consistently adopted a liberal attitude, and never accepted that any difference should be made between developing countries and Europe, the US or other representative democracies. His combative defence of this position earned him enemies among the left in Peru and the rest of Latin America, where it has often been argued that writers ought to be on the side of the majority of poor and downtrodden, providing them with a voice they are denied. Through the next decades, Vargas Llosa continued to publish novels that won him success and critical attention throughout the world. Some, like The Storyteller (1987) or Death in the Andes (1993), suggest he was attempting a Peruvian version of Balzac's multi-volume collection La Comédie Humaine, trying to encompass the whole of Peruvian society in his works. But, as he made plain in the critical work The Perpetual Orgy (1975), his personal preference was for another French master, Gustave Flaubert, for his modern spirit, his sense of irony and his intense preoccupation with language and style. Vargas Llosa's international reputation led the Peruvian government to involve him directly in political matters in his home country. In 1983 he was asked to help investigate the killing of eight journalists in the remote Andean village of Uchuraccay. This occurred at the height of the struggle between Shining Path guerrillas and the Peruvian armed forces, and Vargas Llosa once again infuriated the left in Peru and elsewhere when he agreed with the official version that the villagers had mistaken the journalists for guerrilla fighters and killed them, rather than insisting that the blame lay with the security forces. His move to rightwing liberalism also came from his voracious reading. It was French historians such as Fernand Braudel who convinced him that the development of markets and the possibility of trading in the Middle Ages was fundamental to human nature. He found further confirmation of his political philosophy in the careers of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whom he fervently admired. Once more, Vargas Llosa translated these beliefs into action in his native Peru. When in 1986 the leftwing populist government under Alan García declared its intention to default on the country's foreign debt and to nationalise the banks, Vargas Llosa began a protest campaign in the name of individual freedom. It was this campaign that fed his presidential aspirations. In 1989, he presented himself as candidate for a variety of rightwing and centrist parties, campaigning on a conservative free-market ticket. He brought in campaign managers from Britain and set about using his writing and speaking skills to win over the Peruvian electorate. Unfortunately, it was plain from attending his political rallies that, although he might imaginatively understand the situation of hugely different sectors of Peruvian society, he did not have much idea of how to speak to them directly. Despite this uneasiness, he won most votes in the first round of the presidential election and was confident of winning the second round against an unknown Peruvian-Japanese agronomist, Alberto Fujimori. In the weeks between the two rounds of voting, however, Fujimori gained increasing support from poor Peruvians who saw in the light-skinned, cosmopolitan Vargas Llosa exactly the same kind of ruler who had been making unkept promises to them for several hundred years. Eventually, it came as little surprise that it was Fujimori who won. Vargas Llosa quit politics, unable at first to believe that he had been rejected in this way. His bitterness surfaced in Death in the Andes (1993), in which he portrays Peru's Andean society as so backward that it is capable of cannibalism. Around the same period, he withdrew to a more intimate fictional world, exploring the possibilities of eroticism in In Praise of the Stepmother (1988) and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997). Although no longer directly involved in politics, Vargas Llosa used his journalistic skills to lambast the Fujimori regime, especially following the 'auto-coup' the president engineered in 1992. Vargas Llosa complained that by way of reprisal, the authorities demolished his Lima home. This led him to renounce his Peruvian citizenship, and in 1993 he took Spanish nationality. The Feast of the Goat (2000) is his outstanding contribution to a long tradition of Latin American novels examining the abuses of power by dictators in the region. It deals with the Dominican Republic's dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the moral, sexual and political corruption implied by authoritarian rule. 'I wanted a realist treatment of a human being who became a monster because of the power he accumulated and the lack of resistance and criticism … Converted into a god, you become a devil,' Vargas Llosa commented of what many saw as his finest book. He continued to explore subjects outside Latin America that were nevertheless linked to Peru. The Way to Paradise (2003) concerned not only Paul Gauguin in Tahiti, but also the artist's grandmother, Flora Tristan, an early revolutionary feminist in Peru. His 2010 novel The Dream of the Celt is a fictional account of the life and death of Roger Casement, whose views on slavery and colonialism were radicalised by his experiences during the time he spent living in the Peruvian Amazon. In that same year, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. His acceptance speech was a passionate defence of fiction and reading, insisting that 'without fiction we would be less conscious of the importance of the freedom that makes life liveable, and the hell it becomes when it is constrained by a tyrant, ideology or religion'. He had previously (in 1994) been the recipient of the Cervantes prize, the highest honour for writers in the Spanish-speaking world. In 2011, his friendship with the Spanish king Juan Carlos resulted in his being given the title of Marquis of Vargas Llosa. He and Urquidi divorced in 1964, and the following year he married his cousin Patricia Llosa. In 2015 he separated from her, and publicly announced his relationship with the socialite Isabel Preysler, much to the delight of the gossip magazines. The Neighbourhood (2018) is a steamy tale of the Peruvian jetset featuring blackmail by such a magazine. Their relationship ended in 2023, Vargas Llosa saying he wanted to devote more time to literature. His novel Tiempos Recios (2019) was his last to be published in English, as Harsh Times (2022). It examines a historical event, in this case the CIA-backed coup against the Guatemalan government in 1954, through a fictional account. In addition to novels, Vargas Llosa wrote extensively for the theatre, and acted in several of his own plays. He once told me in an interview, when asked what he thought would make a suitable epigraph for him: 'He lived life to the full, and loved literature above all else.' He is survived by a daughter, Morgana, and two sons, Álvaro and Gonzalo, from his second marriage. Mario Vargas Llosa, writer, born 28 March 1936; died 13 April 2025
Arab Times
14-04-2025
- Politics
- Arab Times
Mario Vargas Llosa, renowned Peruvian author and Nobel laureate, dies at 89
LIMA, Peru, April 14: Mario Vargas Llosa, the celebrated Peruvian author and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, passed away on Sunday at the age of 89. Known for his profound exploration of power structures and individual resistance, Vargas Llosa's most notable works include The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral, and The Feast of the Goat. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." His family confirmed his passing in a statement, expressing sorrow but finding solace in his long and fruitful life and enduring literary legacy. Vargas Llosa's literary career began in 1959 with The Cubs and Other Stories, but his breakthrough came with The Time of the Hero in 1963, which provoked outrage among Peru's military. A leading figure in the Latin American literary Boom of the 1960s, his work often critiqued military brutality, societal corruption, and political power. A fierce advocate for personal and economic freedoms, Vargas Llosa distanced himself from his earlier socialist beliefs, becoming a vocal critic of leftist regimes in Latin America. His political evolution included a brief candidacy for the presidency of Peru in 1990, though he was defeated by Alberto Fujimori. Born on March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, Vargas Llosa's early life was marked by personal upheaval. He went on to study literature at Peru's San Marcos University before pursuing a doctorate in Madrid. His works drew heavily on Peruvian society but were shaped by his experiences living abroad, particularly in Spain, New York, and Paris. Vargas Llosa's personal life included two marriages and a series of relationships, with his most recent being with Isabel Preysler. He is survived by his children, who have requested that his remains be cremated with no public ceremony. His contributions to literature, his political views, and his global influence on Latin American culture remain significant, and his work continues to resonate worldwide.
CNN
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize-winning author, dies at 89
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian-Spanish Nobel Prize-winning author whose work focused on the evils of totalitarianism and who once ran for president, has died at age 89, according to his family. 'It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas LLosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,' said a family statement shared by his son Álvaro Vargas Llosa on X on Sunday. Vargas Llosa will be best remembered for novels including 'Conversation in the Cathedral' (1969), 'The War of the End of the World' (1981), and 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter' (1977), which was adapted for the 1990 feature film 'Tune in Tomorrow,' starring Barbara Hershey and Keanu Reeves. In 2010, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish academy called 'his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.' In their statement Sunday, the novelist's three children said Vargas Llosa's 'departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world.' 'But we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,' they said. Vargas Llosa will be farewelled by his family and close friends at a private event, the statement added. Peru's President Dina Ercilia Boluarte Zegarra expressed her condolences to the Vargas Llosa family, signing off a social media post with, 'Rest in peace, illustrious Peruvian of all time.' 'His intellectual genius and vast body of work will remain an everlasting legacy for future generations. We express our deepest condolences to his family, friends, and the world of literature,' Peru's presidential office said in the statement on X. Born in Arequipa, southern Peru, Vargas Llosa spent his early years in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where his grandfather was the Peruvian consul, before attending a military school and the National University of San Marcos in the Peruvian capital Lima. By 1952 he had published his first work, a play called 'La guide del Inca,' and he soon became a regular contributor to the Peruvian literary press. Vargas Llosa worked as a journalist and broadcaster, and attended the University of Madrid before moving to Paris. In 1963 he published his first novel, 'La ciudad y los perros' – known in English as 'The Time of the Hero' – to wide acclaim. It was eventually translated into more than a dozen languages. It was followed by novels including 'The Green House' (1966) and 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service' (1973). After stints in London, where he lectured at King's College; the United States, where he spent a year as writer in residence at Washington State University; and Barcelona, he moved back to Lima in 1974. A translated collection of his essays was published in English in 1978. In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru, on a platform of what he called classical liberalism – a belief in individual initiative, free from interference by the state. After losing the election to outsider candidate Alberto Fujimori in a second-round landslide, he moved to Spain, becoming a Spanish citizen in 1993. He won the Cervantes Prize, a prestigious Spanish literary award, a year later. Later novels included 'The Feast of the Goat' in 2000 and 'The Bad Girl' in 2006. When Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010, he told the organizers in an interview that he had been inspired by French writer Gustave Flaubert, 'because he managed, not being a born genius, to build his genius through effort, commitment, perseverance, discipline.' Vargas Llosa also revealed how he believed that literature and politics were linked. 'I am convinced that, for example, democratic culture, culture based on freedom, on respect of human rights, was something that was possible because we had people that were sensibilized by art, by literature, by culture in general, about the sufferance, the injustices, the inequalities, the abuses who were so extended in real life,' he said. 'So, I think literature is pleasure but it's also a very important instrument to move forward in life.' This story has been updated with additional information.
