Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa combines gritty realism with playful eroticism and a description of the struggle for personal freedom in Latin America, while also writing a paper that makes him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, who died in Lima on Sunday. He is 89 years old.
His death was announced in a social media statement by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.
Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, won the famous writer as a young writer, invisible sights of corruption, moral compromise and the cruel carnival of Peru. He joined a group of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina.
His disgust of Peru's polite social norms gave him rich inspiration. After Vargas Llosa enrolled at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Vargas Llosa turned this experience into his first novel The The Hero, an important description of military life published in 1963.
The book was condemned by several generals, including one who claimed the book was funded by Ecuador to destroy Peru’s army – all of which made it a direct success.
However, Mr. Vargas Llosa was never completely fascinated by the magical realism of his contemporaries. Fidel Castro's persecution of Cuba's disillusionment has dispelled him, which has detached the left ideology from the ideology that has been swaying among many writers in Latin America for decades.
He painted his own path together as a conservative, often divided political thinker and, as a novelist, transformed the plot from personal life to books that far exceed the boundaries of his homeland.
His political involvement eventually led to the presidency in 1990. The game allowed him to advocate for the free market he advocated, including privatizing state-owned enterprises, and reduce inflation through government spending reductions and layoffs.
He led the polls for most of the competition but was defeated by Alberto Fujimori, a little-known agronomist of Japanese descent, who later adopted many of the policies of Mr. Vargas Llosa.
Mr. Vargas Llosa was passionate about novels, but he was initially in the field of journalism. As a teenager, he was a nighttime reporter for La Crónica, Lima, documenting the underworld of diving bars, crime and prostitution. The element of this experience is incorporated into his 1969 novel The Talk of the Cathedral, a description of Peru’s discomfort against Peru under the military dictatorship of the 1950s, a book that is often considered his masterpiece.
Although he often wrote for newspapers in Europe and the United States, he experienced a rebirth of news and gained citizenship as a columnist for the Spanish newspaper El País in the 1990s.
His two-week column, “Piedra de Toque” or “Touchstone”, was combined in Spanish-language newspapers in Latin America and the United States. It provides him with a platform for themes such as the reappearance of populism in the Andes, the art of Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin or support for the State of Israel, which are often topics in his political writing.
These columns can be autobiographical or inspired by news events and often lose adjectives and write elegantly in a style that enables Mr. Vargas Llosa to engage with readers who may not have the patience to complete his longer, complex and elaborate novels.
“We do have many quirky newspaper columnists in the United States, but who among them has the figure of Vargas Llosa in Spanish civilization?” literary critic Ilan Stavans wrote in a 2003 analysis of the column. “He is a polymorphic polydialysis, his wisdom is gently worn, his eyes and ears are everywhere, and his voice is as loud as thunder.”
Perhaps most importantly, these columns allow Mr. Vargas Llosa to advance his idea of how personal freedom depends on the creation and reinforcement of a society based on free trade.
He often mocked these principles in Latin America, ranking the most important critics among the most prominent critics in Venezuela and Cuba.
But the idea of free markets has almost an inherent appeal to him. When British conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990, she received flowers from Mr. Vargas Llosa. He also wrote a note and read: “Ms.: There are not enough words in the dictionary to thank you for everything you have done for the cause of freedom.”
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa is Born on March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, southern Peru, he spent most of his childhood in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba with his mother Dora Llosa and his grandparents. They formed a modest middle-class family, but Patrian's lineage, and he was told his father was dead.
His parents were actually separated a few months before his birth, and his father, Ernesto Vargas, worked in Panagra, worked abroad and demanded a divorce from his wife.
They were reunited in Peru when they were 10 years old. After this experience, at the age of 19, Mr. Vargas Llosa stood out with his uncle's sister son Julia Urquidi Illanes, 29 years old.
The turbulent marriage shocked his family and inspired him to write “Aunt Julia and Screenwriter.” The book, published in 1977, is one of his most famous novels, translated into English, describing the comedy horror film of Marito Varguitas, a young law student and aspiring writer who fell in love with his aunt in the context of a radio soap opera.
Ms. Urkidi responded to the book in a key memoir with Mr. Vargas Llosa, “Varguitas said nothing,” detailing their intense efforts and tense years together in Europe. They divorced in 1964, and Mr. Vargas Llosa married Patricia Llosa, who had three children.
After 50 years of marriage, they separated in 2015 after confirming his romantic involvement with singer Julio Iglesias' ex-wife Isabel Preysler. He and Ms. Preysler were separated in 2022 and were born in the Philippines and became a high-profile socialite in Spain.
His sons Álvaro and Gonzalo and a daughter Morgana survived.
Although Peruvian deciphering dominates, Mr. Vargas Llosa lived abroad for a long time. In the 1960s, in Paris, he served as an interpreter and wrote news announcements for Agence France-Presse to make ends meet, and later settled in his writing life in Barcelona before returning to Peru in the 1970s.
Although Mr. Vargas Llosa gained a greater reputation as a novelist, his 1990 presidential campaign was surprising as he wrote an opinion paper denouncing President Alan García's plan to nationalize banks.
Just as Peruvians fought against the glittering bombing movement of Maoist guerrilla groups and the bombing movement of the road to explosion, Mr. Vargas Llosa temporarily stopped writing novels and formed his own right-wing party called the Freedom Movement.
His brain candidate qualifications were inspired by European and North American political and economic philosophers, and his appearance was brighter in light-colored skin, a trimmed body and a preference for pre-sweaters, in stark contrast to a voter composed of the infamous Quechua speaking.
Mr. Fujimori, citing his non-European descent, portrays himself as an allies of the lower class, which has long been dominated by elite whites. Likewise, his opponent questioned whether Peru should be admitted by the author to be unknowable and whether it should be dominated by Mr. Vargas Llosa.
Disillusioned by failed politics, Mr. Vargas Llosa left Peru again in the early 1990s, separating his time between writing bases in London, a writing base in London, his residence in Knightsbridge and Madrid.
To the frustration of many in Peru, the Spanish King Juan Carlos signed a royal decree in 1993 to grant Spanish citizenship to Mr. Vargas Llosa, who still retained his Peruvian passport and continued to Lima.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Mr. Vargas Llosa won other differences, including the Spanish Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1994 and the Jerusalem Prize in 1995, and has produced over 50 novels, essays, scripts, scripts and literary criticism throughout his long career.
His best works examine historical changes in Latin America, such as the “Apocalypse War” (1981), a narrative of the enormous fiction in the late 19th century in Canudos, a small town in the arid region of northeastern Brazil.
Mr. Vargas Llosa studied the book in the archives of Rio de Janeiro and El Salvador and wrote it in 1980 at the Wilson Center in Washington, not far from the battlefield of the Civil War, a conflict that may have helped him evoke the cruel violence of the Brazilian aristocratic leaders.
Mr. Vargas Llosa wrote in the prelude to the book: “I was shrouded in flying falcons, and within viewing distance of the balcony, Abraham Lincoln talked among his union soldiers on the edge of the battle of Manassas.”
Yet, while he could write gracefully anywhere, Peru particularly fascinated him, who once wrote with “skepticism, passion and anger” and even a kind of hatred “indulging in tenderness.”
“You know Herman Melville calls Lima the weirdest, most pathetic city,” Mr. Vargas Llosa refers to a passage from “Moby Dick” who, in a New York Times interviewer in 1989, seemed unable to get out of literature and the campaign, even in his campaign.
“Why?” said Mr. Vargas Llosa. “Mist and drizzle.”
Then he smiled and said, “I'm not sure fog and drizzle are the big problems for Lima.”
Yan Zhuang Contribution report.
