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Journalism of Courage
Peruvian-Spanish author and 2010 Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa passed away Sunday at the age of 89. Across a career spanning more than six decades, he became one of the most formidable voices in world literature, whose works dissected authoritarianism, corruption, and power.
Honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat,” Vargas Llosa’s work remains essential reading.
Vargas Llosa’s debut marked the arrival of a bold new voice in Latin American fiction. Based on his own years at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, the novel is a critique of military culture and its dehumanising effects. Narrated from shifting perspectives, The Time of the Hero reveals a world of hazing, cruelty, and moral ambiguity. In Peru, the book ignited a scandal. so much so that the military reportedly publicly burned a thousand copies. In this book Llosa dissects power structures not from the top down, but from within.
Both farce and memoir, this novel demonstrates Vargas Llosa’s comedic genius. Set in 1950s Lima, it chronicles the coming-of-age of a young writer—a Vargas Llosa stand-in—who falls in love with his older, flamboyant Aunt Julia while navigating life as a struggling journalist. The narrative is interwoven with the increasingly absurd soap operas. By blending fact with fiction and poking fun at the act of storytelling itself, Vargas Llosa created a metafictional delight.
A work of historical fiction, this epic novel is set in late 19th-century Brazil, during the real-life Canudos Rebellion. In a remote backwater, a messianic preacher and his ragtag followers establish a utopian commune—only to be violently suppressed by the state. The War of the End of the World is Vargas Llosa’s meditation on fanaticism, faith, and the deadly consequences of ideological purity.
The novel explores the final days of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Told from multiple perspectives—including that of a woman returning home decades later to confront the traumas of the regime—The Feast of the Goat is an exploration of the mechanisms of tyranny. Vargas Llosa captures the atmosphere of fear, complicity, and decay that surrounds a crumbling dictatorship, while offering insight into how authoritarianism imprints itself on the collective psyche.
A late-career departure into the romantic and deeply personal, The Bad Girl follows the decades-long obsession of Ricardo Somocurcio, a Peruvian expatriate, with a mysterious and elusive woman who reappears throughout his life under different names and identities. From Lima to Paris to Tokyo, their love affair is by turns passionate, toxic, and tender. Part love story, part meditation on identity, the novel shows Vargas Llosa writing with a more intimate, emotional depth—without abandoning his signature elegance and psychological insight.
