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Mario Vargas Llosa, who has deceased At the age of 89, almost became president of Peru in 1990. Standing on a liberal platform for the coalition of the democratic front, the novelist exceeded the first-round survey. Although routine in Europe and the United States, the mixture of llosa vargas of pluralism of rule of law and the suspicion of exaggerated state remains an exotic position in Latin America. The camp of his populist rival Alberto Fujimori represented it – as criticisms have often done – as an elitist outside contact distant from the native masses of his homeland. Fujimori (later sentenced to 25 years in prison) won the runoff but plunged the nation into a corrupt dictatorship.
If the Peruvian failed to become a writer-states like Václav Havel, he then joined the Spanish nobility as the 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa. And he had bitter satisfaction to see Fujimori's crimes echo a favorite plot. Brilliantly, regularly, he wrote on the right and left -wing tyrants that seduced Latin America. The goat party (2000) transform the Trujillo regime of the Dominican Republic into hypnotic and propulsive fiction because it dramatizes “enthronement, by propaganda and violence, of a monstrous lie”.
In 2010, the prolific, Department but combative The author of 20 novels and a test and memoir shelf won the only distinction that praised his real gifts: the Nobel Prize In literature. The quotation of the Swedish academy congratulated the “cartography of the power structures of Vargas Llosa and its sliced images of … Resistance, Revolt and Defeat”.
This formula catches constant themes but is missing its dynamic, high enthusiasm and ingenious pursuit. Among the giants of the generation of Latin American “boom”, Vargas Llosa was the multi-purpose endless profession. He had written for television soap operas; His spiritual semi-autobiographical battery Aunt Julia and the screenwriter (1977) carries the traces of the winding and lurid teenovela. However, this flexible change of form could also imagine a millennial cult in Brazil (War of the end of the world1981) or recreate the life of the Irish human rights activist who has become Rebel Roger Casement (Celt's dream2010).
Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa in 1936. The framework of the Andes of the city and the colonial heritage haunted its writing. His family combined a patrician past with an unstable gift. After the divorce disrupted his childhood, a miserable fate in a military school in Lima led to sensational beginnings, Hero's time (1963): First of many anatomies of poorly used power and the truth has betrayed. He studied in Spain (where he lived later often), wrote in Paris and married Julia Urquidi Illanes: the sister-in-law of his uncle. After their divorce, he married a cousin: Patricia Llosa, mother of her three children.
Back in Peru, the brothel of Green House and the deep plots of Conversation in the cathedral (1969) united with a meticulous examination of institutional injustice with a sumptuous and sensual narration. During a period, Vargas Llosa and his friend (then) Gabriel García Márquez was held at the twin ridges of a wave of conquest. Politics separated them. “Gabo” kept the faith with the revolutionary left, especially Cuba of Castro, while the “English” liberalism of Vargas Llosa has harden. But it was a personal quarrel (linked to his troubled marriage) which led the latter to the ground García Márquez with a punch during a projection of Mexican film in 1976.
At home too, he fought. His free-discourse activism has made authoritarian enemies. After the Maoist guerrillas of the “brilliant path” launched their insurrection in 1980, the civil conflicts of Peru left deeper wounds. He conducted a contested government investigation into a massacre of journalists, while the long agony of terrorism and repression of the nation bore fictitious fruits The real life of Alejandro Mayta (1984) and Death in the Andes (1993). Vargas Llosa has now strengthened the liberal position – pro -human rights, but pro -enterprise too – this would lead to its presidential race. Admittedly, no other figurehead of the Latin American literary boom has never supported with Margaret Thatcher – which he admired. (London, with Paris and Madrid, has become a house far from her house.)
Its campaign failure inaugurated a second gold mandate as a literary leader – bristly and salty memories A fish in water (1993) in the magistrate The goat party and a pairing of the Tristan pioneer feminist flora with his painter Paul Gauguin The Chemin du Paradis (2003). The path from Latin America to Paradise, he insisted, has not crossed charismatic populism. The appeal of the tribe (2018) reject the utopian plans in favor of the ironic pluralism of his liberal heroes: Adam Smith to Isaiah Berlin. Subsequent novels such as The discreet hero (2013) present a topical bite and a zest focused on the plot are almost never found in the octogeniares nobilists.
Sophisticated, elegant, cosmopolitan, Vargas Llosa could appear as a “neoliberal” ogre to leftists – a caricature derailed by his work but reinforced by the provocations of the media, such as the support of the Jair Bolsonaro lasts right against Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva in the Brazil elections in 2022. Loser, ”laughed an enemy.
The great authors of Latin America have never had the luxury of working in an area without politics. This proximity has tended to do more harm than good. This was also the case for Vargas Llosa. He will not support as a thwarted power researcher but an eloquent and inventive scourge of his attackers, a virtuoso storyteller of private passions and public events – and a visionary interpreter of dreams of his continent of a better life for all.
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