Spanish
Mario Vargas Llosa is a Spanish-Peruvian writer. Considered one of the most important contemporary novelists and essayists, his works have garnered numerous awards, including the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 1994 Cervantes Prize —considered the most important in the Spanish language—, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the 1962 Biblioteca Breve, the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and the 1993 Planeta Prize, among others.
Along with Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, he is one of the central exponents of the Latin American boom.
As a writer, Mario Vargas Llosa achieved fame in the 1960s with novels such as La ciudad y los perros (1963), La casa verde (1966) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969). He continued to prolifically cultivate various literary genres, such as the essay, the article, and theater. Several of his works have been adapted for film and television.
Most of his novels are set in Peru and explore his conception of Peruvian society; however, in The War of the End of the World (1981), The Feast of the Goat (2000) and The Dream of the Celt (2010) he sets his plots in other countries.
Like other Latin American authors, he has participated in politics. After sympathizing with communism in his youth, from the 1980s onwards he adhered to liberalism.
He was a candidate for the presidency of Peru in the 1990 elections by the center-right political coalition Democratic Front. He lost the election in the second round against the candidate of Cambio 90, Alberto Fujimori.
In 2011 Mario Vargas Llosa was named the first marqués of Vargas Llosa by King Juan Carlos I of Spain.
In 2021, he was elected a member of the French Academy to occupy seat number 18 of that institution, of which he is the first member who has not written works in the French language, although he speaks it fluently. This election was favored by the fact that Vargas Llosa was the first non-French-language writer whose work was published in his lifetime by the prestigious La Pléiade collection of Gallimard. He is the second Latin American to join the academy after the Argentine Héctor Bianciotti.
You may be interested in: «Arranca» the new song by Becky G and Omega
Vargas Llosa, first Spanish writer to enter the French Academy
What is your real name? His real name is Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, he was born into a middle-class family in the city of Arequipa, in southern Peru in 1936. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado (Lima, 1905-1979) and his wife Dora Llosa Ureta (Arequipa, 1914-1995), who separated months before his birth to divorce after it, by mutual agreement. Shortly after Mario was born, his father revealed that he had a relationship with a German woman and as a result of that union, two younger half-brothers of the writer were born: Enrique and Ernesto Vargas (the first died of leukemia at the age of eleven; the second is a lawyer and US citizen). His father was the only son of Marcelino Vargas and his first wife Zenobia Maldonado, who died in 1925. His paternal grandfather married for the second time with Constanza Serpa and they had eight sons and daughters (Manuel Vargas Serpa, Ana Vargas Serpa, Rosa Vargas Serpa, Yolanda Vargas Serpa, Humberto Vargas Serpa, Ortencia Vargas Serpa, María de Lourdes Vargas Serpa and Orlando Vargas Serpa). On his mother's side, he descends from the Biscayan field master Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno who settled in Arequipa in 1702. Mario lived with his maternal family in Arequipa until a year after his parents' divorce, in 1937, at which time his grandfather Pedro J. Llosa Bustamante moved with his entire family to Bolivia, where he had obtained a contract to manage a cotton plantation near Cochabamba. In that city, he spent the following nine years of his childhood, where he learned to read and write. Along with his mother and maternal family, he attended up to the fourth grade at the "Colegio La Salle." Until the age of ten, he was led to believe that his father had passed away, as his mother and family did not want to explain that they had separated. When the government of President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero began in 1945, his grandfather, who was a first cousin of the president, obtained the position of prefect of the department of Piura, so the whole family returned to Peru. Mario's uncles settled in Lima, while Mario and his mother followed his grandfather to the city of Piura. Allí Mario continuó sus estudios de primaria en el Colegio Salesiano Don Bosco, cursando el quinto grado. Fue ahí donde hizo amistad con uno de sus compañeros, Javier Silva Ruete, quien tiempo después sería ministro de economía. In late 1946 or early 1947, and when he was ten years old, Mario met his father for the first time in Piura. His parents re-established their relationship and moved to Lima, settling in the middle-class district of Magdalena del Mar. Then they moved to La Perla, in Callao, where they lived in a small isolated house. On weekends Mario used to visit his uncles and cousins, who lived in the Diego Ferré neighborhood, in the Miraflores district, where he made many friends and where he had his first crushes. Mario has captured these places in many of his books as a fond memory. In Lima, he studied at the La Salle School, of the congregation Brothers of the Christian Schools, taking the sixth grade of primary school in 1947, and the first two years of secondary school from 1948 to 1949. The relationship with his father, always tortuous, would mark the rest of his life. For years, she harbored mixed feelings towards him, such as fear and resentment, because during her childhood she had to endure violent outbursts from her father, as well as resentment towards the Llosa family and great jealousy towards her mother but, above all, because of her father's repulsion for her literary vocation, which he never understood. At the age of 14, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military School, in Callao, a boarding school where he attended the 3rd and 4th years of secondary education, between 1950 and 1951. There he endured a fierce military discipline and, according to his testimony, it was the time when he read and wrote "as he had never done before", thus consolidating his precocious vocation as a writer. In his book The Time of the Hero, Vargas Llosa portrays the vivid experience, the discipline to which he was subjected in the military school. His favorite readings were the novels of the French writers Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. Among his teachers was the surrealist poet César Moro, who for a time gave him French classes. During the summer holidays of 1952, Vargas Llosa began working as a journalist in the Lima newspaper La Crónica where he was assigned local reports, notes and interviews. That same year he retired from the military school and moved to Piura, where he lived with his uncle Luis Llosa ("Uncle Lucho") and attended the last year of secondary education at the San Miguel de Piura school. Simultaneously, he worked for the local newspaper, La Industria, and witnessed the theatrical performance of his first play, La huida del Inca, at the "Variedades" theater. In 1953, during the government of Manuel A. Odría, Vargas Llosa entered the National University of San Marcos, where he studied Law and Literature. He participated in university politics through Cahuide, the name under which the Peruvian Communist Party, then persecuted by the Odría government, remained alive, against which Vargas Llosa opposed through university bodies and in fleeting protests in public squares. Shortly thereafter, he distanced himself from the group and joined the Christian Democratic Party of Héctor Cornejo Chávez, hoping that this group would launch the candidacy of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, who, at that time, was returning from exile. That expectation was not met. During this time, he worked as an assistant to the renowned San Marcos historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea on a work that never came to fruition: several volumes of a monumental history of the conquest of Peru. In May 1955, at the age of 19, he married Julia Urquidi, the sister of his political aunt on his mother's side, who was 10 years older and already divorced. Due to the rejection that this marriage caused in his family, the couple was forced to separate for a time despite being newly married. To maintain a life in common, young Mario, with the help of Porras Barrenechea, held up to seven jobs simultaneously: as a librarian assistant at the Club Nacional, writing for various newspapers and even cataloging names from the tombstones of the Presbítero Matías Maestro Cemetery in Lima; he finally started working as a journalist at Radio Panamericana, substantially increasing his income. By then, Vargas Llosa seriously began his literary career with the publication of his first stories: El abuelo (in the newspaper El Comercio, December 9, 1956) and Los jefes (in the journal Mercurio Peruano, February 1957). In late 1957, he entered a short story contest organized by La Revue Française, an important French publication dedicated to art. His story entitled El desafío (The Challenge) won first prize, which consisted of a fifteen-day visit to Paris, where he departed in January 1958. His stay in the French capital lasted for a month, before returning to Lima. That same year he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Humanities from the National University of San Marcos, based on his thesis on the Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío. He was also considered the most distinguished San Marcos Literature student, for which he received the Javier Prado scholarship to pursue postgraduate courses at the Complutense University of Madrid, in Spain. Before leaving for Europe, he took a short trip through the Peruvian Amazon, an experience that would later serve him to set three of his novels —The Green House, Pantaleón and the Visitors, and The Storyteller— in that geographical space. Mario Vargas Llosa has been defined as one of the most complete narrators of his generation and a prominent figure in Latin American literature. An ideal representative of the spirit of the Latin American Boom, as he was born literarily with it and helped to define it and identify it with a new generation of writers. His narrative work is characterized by the importance of technical experimentation, an aspect for which he is valued as a master of novelistic composition and in which he has performed as a notable innovator of narrative and stylistic possibilities. From a thematic point of view, his novels deal with the antinomy between the historical and the structural, as expressed by the title of several of his novels (The City and the Dogs, The Green House, Conversation in The Cathedral), in which the presence of structures demonstrates the almost obsessive interest that the author has in them. Also, regarding the tones, his work presents the most varied characteristics, from humor, love, and comedy to tragic downfall. On the other hand, the fact that the bulk of his literary production has been carried out from abroad explains the retrospective bias that dominates a large part of it, as well as the constant reconstruction he makes of intimate or collective experiences of Peru as the basis of his fiction, with some exceptions such as The War of the End of the World and some of his latest novels. As for his literary models, or “precursors” (to whom he has dedicated critical studies in several cases), we must mention, on the one hand, the chivalric novel Tirant lo Blanc, by Joanot Martorell, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, by García Márquez, both as ideals of the concept of total novel (the one that merges the real with the irrational and myth). On the other hand, two writers are essential for Vargas Llosa in particular: Flaubert, as a model of literature as a vocation, of the use of reality as a bottomless pit to find content and themes (the mediocrity of the human being, violence and sex). As a model, also, of the importance of a rigorous narrative structure and of a narrator impassive to the narrated events, etc.; and Faulkner, both in terms of themes and settings, and formal features, especially, multiperspectivism, jumps in time, the use of several narrators instead of the omniscient one, the withholding of information, the use of parallel stories, etc.
