Opinion Mario Vargas Llosa offered a glimpse into the grandeur and decrepitude of being human

Like his literary reputation, the story of his friendship and falling-out with fellow Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez precedes Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday at the age of 89. Five years after publishing García Márquez: Story of a Deicide, a provocative reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude and García Márquez’s myth-making genius, the two giants of Latin American literature met outside a theatre in Mexico City. Instead of an embrace, however, García Márquez received a punch to the face. Theories bloomed like tropical vines: A rumoured affair between García Márquez and Vargas Llosa’s then-wife; a bitter divergence over Fidel Castro. Neither revealed what had fuelled the spat.

To read Vargas Llosa is to encounter such contradictions, not just of the human condition, but also of Latin America. Forged by the fires of revolution and cosmopolitan exile, he dissected the anatomy of power, authoritarianism and freedom with the precision of a surgeon and the passion of a dissident. His political turn, which saw him run for the presidency of Peru in 1990, drew the opprobrium of both the left and the right. But Vargas Llosa thrived in that sense of discomfort. He was a writer of confrontation, of rigour, of the messy dance between doubt and conviction. His debut novel, The Time of the Hero (1963) skewered the corruption of the Peruvian military establishment. Conversations in the Cathedral (1969) mapped the slow erosion of a society under dictatorship; The War of the End of the World (1981) delved into the allure — and devastation — of fanaticism.

Advertisement

By the time the Nobel Prize came to him in 2010, Vargas Llosa had cemented his reputation as a literary colossus. “I think… the great majority of human beings have this aspiration to become other: To live a different identity, at least for a while,” he once said. He offered a glimpse into the grandeur and decrepitude of being human.