PART I

An Intellectual Biography

THE EARLY YEARS (1936–1974)

In the early 1920s a young Peruvian named Ernesto Vargas Maldonado abandoned the city where he was born—Lima, Peru—to experience life in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires. He had won the lottery and his adventuresome spirit led him abroad. He probably had a good time in this crown jewel of South America as long as he had money in his pocket. Faced with the daily reality of economic survival, however, he decided to enroll in vocational training to be an airline pilot. He worked for a few years in the merchant marines in Argentina and, after deciding to return to his native Peru, obtained a job as a radio telegrapher for a company called Panagra at the airport of Tacna, located in the southern region of this nation.

Soon after assuming his new duties in Tacna, he met and fell in love with a young woman, Dora Llosa Ureta, on vacation with her family. She belonged to one of the highly respected families—commonly identified as a distinguida familia (distinguished family)—in Arequipa. One year later, in 1935, Ernesto Vargas and Dora Llosa were married. In an intensely class-conscious society, Ernesto Vargas belonged to what was considered a good family (familia bien), but one that had lost much of its economic power and prestige because of the vicissitudes of Peruvian politics.

Born in 1904 in Lima, which was a traditional and conservative social environment at the time, Vargas received a rigidly conservative Catholic education at the Colegio Guadalupe de Lima, a high school operated by German priests with a reputation for old-school discipline. Ernesto Vargas’s father, Marcelo Vargas, had been a supporter and follower of a local boss (caudillo), Augusto Durán; consequently, the economic security and stability of the Vargas family depended on the success of Durán’s unstable political career. Unfortunately, in the first half of the twentieth century, political and economic life was unpredictable at best and chaotic at worst, and these vicissitudes directly affected the Vargas family. Ernesto Vargas had a difficult childhood, and was forced to drop out of school to work because of the family’s precarious financial situation. His job was in a shoe repair shop. During those years, Ernesto’s father taught him some of the basic skills needed to be a radio operator, laying the groundwork for the boy’s vocational training a few years later in Buenos Aires. The seeds that produced the bitter and resentful adult Ernesto Vargas—far from an ideal father figure—were sown during this unhappy adolescence. As for the fact that Ernesto Vargas had an adventurer’s spirit, his son, the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, attributes this to a family trait that goes back to the arrival of the first Vargas in the Colonial period, during the sixteenth century.

On the maternal side of the family, the Llosas had arrived in Arequipa a little later, in the seventeenth century, and were in general a better-educated and more artistically oriented family than the physically imposing and adventuresome Vargas grouping. Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno came from Spain directly to Arequipa, where he found a quaint and charming seventeenth-century colonial town, as it was well before the rebellion of Tupac Amaru in 1780. The Ciudad Blanca (White City), as it has been called, was replete with numerous churches, a reputation for producing fine wines and liquors (aguardiente), a vibrant commerce of agricultural products, and a predominantly Spanish Caucasian population with a small minority of mestizos, native American indigenous peoples, and African slaves brought from Spanish outposts in the Caribbean region. In the late eighteenth century, Arequipa had fifty to sixty thousand inhabitants. The architectural charm of the colonial town was noteworthy.

The Llosas who followed Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno left a heritage in Arequipa, according to Mario Vargas Llosa himself, “aferrada a ese terruño del sur del Perú al que pobló de abogados, curas, monjas, jueces, profesores, funcionarios, poetas, locos y alguno que otro militar”1 (“Tied to this little land in the south of Peru that he populated with lawyers, priests, nuns, judges, teachers, bureaucrats, poets, crazy people, and a few soldiers”).

Vargas Llosa’s reference to locos (or crazy people) is based partially on family lore. Members of his family, for example, tell the story of a Llosa who arose one day before lunch, went to the Plaza de Armas (town square) to buy the newspaper, and was not heard of again for twenty-five years, when news of his death came from France.2

Members of the immediate Llosa family have often found ways to be involved in a variety of intellectual and artistic activities. Moreover, from the time of Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno’s arrival in the seventeenth century, Arequipa has been a setting for a thriving cultural life, with the abundant presence of poets, essayists, and orators. During the Colonial period of Spanish rule there were several of these “lettered cities” (ciudades letradas), as the Uruguayan literary and critic Ángel Rama has pointed out, and the cult of the word was the equivalent to the exercising of power. Thus, the Llosas were part of this elite elegance and authority that was deeply entrenched in Hispanic cultural and political tradition. Arequipa is also known in Peru as a hotbed for Romantic poets and orators, and there were several such figures in the Llosa lineage. Mario Vargas Llosa’s great-grandfather don Belisario Llosa de Rivera was a well-known lawyer and recognized poet of his time. He published a novel and satirical poems that ridiculed some of Arequipa’s most honored and respected social mores.

Throughout Latin America, arising from cultural traditions inherited from Spain and perpetuated in the Colonial ciudades letradas, the individuals whom today we call “writers” were the escribanos of the Colonial bureaucracy and court poets, who flourished under the auspices of Colonial power. By the nineteenth century, the escribano/court poet had evolved into the lawyer-poet. To be a writer, one often had to be a lawyer as well in order to make a living. Many of these intellectuals, still active in the twentieth century, became known by professional writers as “weekend writers,” a category of writer that Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and many other intellectuals of their generation disdained and rejected. They boldly launched careers as full-time professional creative writers, mostly against the advice of their parents, mentors, and society at large. The typical career in Latin America for those interested in letters had been law; both Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez began law studies, and then abandoned their law careers to launch themselves into the fragile and unstable world of professional fiction writing in Latin America.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s grandfather, don Pedro Llosa Bustamante, was of the generation of intellectuals in Arequipa who would have considered it professional suicide to make the bold decision taken by the writers of the 1960s Boom and attempt to earn a living exclusively by writing. And he was certainly correct. Pedro Llosa Bustamante practiced law, wrote poetry that he occasionally published in the local newspaper, and read voraciously. He was the classic hombre de letras (lettered man, or “Renaissance man,” of the Hispanic tradition) that Vargas Llosa later played out in the more modern, twentieth-century version of the public intellectual. Vargas Llosa’s mother, Dora de Vargas, described Pedro Llosa Bustamante as well educated and well read, or, in her words, “muy ilustrado.”3 The passion for reading that consumed much of the life of Pedro Llosa Bustamante and don Belisario Llosa de Rivero was a dedication to literature; it was also a capacity to consume literature as that orgía perpetua (perpetual orgy) described by their grandson and great-grandson (Mario Vargas Llosa), respectively, decades later, in his description of reading Flaubert in his book The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary.

The Llosa family practiced other traditional artistic endeavors. Mario Vargas Llosa’s grandmother, doña Carmen Ureta de Llosa, was an amateur painter of great skill. She painted detailed landscapes; until her death, Mario Vargas Llosa’s mother, Dora Llosa de Vargas, had three of these landscape paintings in her apartment in Lima, and they were noteworthy remnants of the Llosa line of artists. Dora Llosa de Vargas was not a writer or artist herself, but she was an intellectually lively person who had been an outstanding high school student in the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón, operated by French nuns, in Arequipa.

Of the intellectuals and artists of the Llosa lineage, don Belisario Llosa de Rivero was perhaps the most responsible for passing the family’s literary tradition along to Vargas-Llosa-the-child in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As the most senior and respected male in the family and as the most published writer in the family line, don Belisario often praised the young boy, six to eight years old, for his “preliterate” early scribblings. This encouragement, as well as his mother’s praise for his first verses and his creation of his own endings of children’s stories that he had read, were the earliest positive feedback the young Vargas Llosa received as a writer-in-the-making.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born early in the morning on March 28, 1936, and by the time this birth took place, Ernesto Vargas had abandoned Dora; when Ernesto was informed of the birth of a son he demanded a divorce, which was legally granted. Within a year of his birth, Mario Vargas Llosa was on the first of many adventures of his lifetime: a move to Cochabamba. Vargas Llosa has no recollection of those first months of his life in Arequipa. For his mother, however, in this staunchly conservative Catholic community, the absent husband was the cause of widespread gossip and occasionally cruel speculation about exactly what might have happened to Dorita, to Ernesto, and to their relationship. As the weeks and months passed by with no explanation for Ernesto’s disappearance, Dora Llosa de Vargas suffered both emotional loss and growing social ostracism. The story the young boy heard from the family was that his father had been a pilot and hero who died in an airline accident. Once her father had the opportunity to move the family with the suffering daughter and her new baby to Bolivia to rent a hacienda in order to grow cotton, he signed a ten-year lease. “Prejudiced and afraid of its own shadow” is how Mario Vargas Llosa, years later, described that society of Arequipa.4

When Dora Llosa de Vargas and her baby left her parents’ home on Bulevar Parra of Arequipa—where, on the second floor, that baby had been born—it was a bad period for the Llosa family. These were not the best of times in Peru and Latin America, either. In the year Mario Vargas Llosa was born Peru and the region were still recovering from the worldwide economic depression. The nation was torn by strife and in disarray. Luis Ereyuren won the presidential election in 1936 with the support of the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, a leftist and populist political party), but this party was declared illegal and the election results nullified.

Bolivia, where Vargas Llosa would spend his childhood, was living the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932–1935) and was entering a period of “military socialism.” As workers demanded economic justice in Peru and throughout Latin America, worker movements and unions grew, producing widespread conflict, such as a 1936 strike in Venezuela.

In Peru and the Andean region, writers attempted to depict this social injustice and political conflict using the narrative strategies associated with nineteenth-century realism. The leading fiction writers of the Andean region at the time of the birth of Vargas Llosa were José María Arguedas and Ciro Alegría in Peru, Jorge Icaza in Ecuador, and Augusto Céspedes in Bolivia. These novelists had a commitment to social and political change, and in Latin America writers fell into two broad categories. On the one hand, novelists wrote defenses of urban workers. On the other, they wrote indigenista (native American–based) works depicting the exploitation of indigenous Americans and often dealing with the loss of their cultural identity in the face of modernization. Arguedas, Alegría, and Icaza were pioneer indigenista writers; throughout his career as an adult, Vargas Llosa wrote in praise of Arguedas, who was a special case in Peru, for he lived both inside and outside of indigenous culture. Many modern scholars and critics have considered Alegría and Icaza, as well as many of their contemporaries in Latin America, to have been too linear, too simplistic in their representation of social inequities, and too black-and-white in their depiction of human beings. Thus, Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941, The world is broad and alien) was at the same time both a supposed masterpiece of indigenista literature and a novelistic embarrassment for Vargas Llosa and many writers of his generation who were interested in a more complex, modernist-type fiction.

In retrospect, the most noteworthy novel published the year Vargas Llosa was born was not from the Andean region or any other region of Latin America. It was a novel related to a very specific region of the southern United States, and one that became hugely important for Vargas Llosa when he was an aspiring young writer—Absalom, Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Vargas Llosa placed this Faulkner novel high on the list of most important books for him.

Vargas Llosa lived an idyllic childhood in Cochabamba. He experienced economic and emotional security in an ideal educational and cultural setting as a young boy in the family home in Cochabamba. In his book A Fish in Water, he describes nothing but the most positive memories of these childhood years. The political good fortune of the Llosa family, however, led to his grandfather’s appointment to the position of prefect in the northern Peruvian city of Piura. Dora Llosa de Vargas and her son thus moved with the family from Cochabamba to Piura in 1945.

The move to this town opened an entirely new world to a young boy who had enjoyed not only an ideal childhood in Bolivia, but also a very protected and pampered life. Compared to other boys his age, he was notably innocent. Exploring different neighborhoods with his new friends, the young Vargas Llosa saw on the outskirts of the town of Piura a mysterious place they called “the green house,” a large house which he eventually came to understand was a bordello.

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According to the author himself, the year 1945 in Piura was “decisive” for numerous reasons, not all of which are even clear to him.5 “I believe no other period before or after has affected me so deeply as those months in Piura. For what reason? The problem intrigues me, and I have tried several times to understand it.”6 His speculation leads him in several directions. Perhaps it was seeing the sea for the first time, as his mother claims. Perhaps it was seeing his native country of Peru for the first time, after living the first eight years in Cochabamba. He also speculates that perhaps the main reason that year in Piura affected him so deeply was that it included the moment, on a day he and some of his friends were attempting to swim in the Piura River, when his young cohorts explained to him the biological basis for human birth. Until that afternoon, the innocent Vargas Llosa still believed that babies came from Paris, delivered by storks. The adult author has described being “offended” by this “emotional earthquake.”⁷ In reality, this revelation was the major one of a series of deeply disturbing events that subverted life as Vargas Llosa had known it for the first eight years of his idyllic existence in Cochabamba. On that day while the boys were swimming, a formerly poetic understanding of childbirth was replaced with a version that was so pedestrian and crude that Vargas Llosa found it offensive.

Piura was also the place the young Mario discovered a neighborhood called La Mangachería. This neighborhood was the home, in the real history of Peru, of a historical figure who is named in the novel The Green House and who is important to understanding the fictional characters within that book. This nearly mythical figure was Colonel Luis M. Sánchez Cerro, who was from Piura and supposedly had been born in La Mangachería. Whether this popular mythology is historically true or not is less important than the fact that many working-class inhabitants of La Mangachería, such as the “Inconquistables” in La casa verde, believed it was. Sánchez Cerro was an important figure in the history of twentieth-century Peru, and he appears in La casa verde. According to Vargas Llosa, there were pictures of Sánchez Cerro in the shacks of all these residents—the mangaches.⁸

The father of eight children, Sánchez Cerro was born in Piura in 1899 to a modest family; his father was a notary public. Educated in public schools in Piura, he was one of the few presidents of Peru who had not been educated in an elite private high school. At the age of sixteen he entered the Chorrillos Military School, from which he graduated in 1910. A famous conspirator in a military insurrection against President Guillermo Billinghurst, he participated in a failed act of rebellion against President Augusto Bernardo Leguía in 1922. A process of national mythification began on August 22, 1930, when he again raised the banner of a rebellion in Arequipa against the government of Leguía, which had ruled in an autocratic manner during the oncenio (eleven-year rule), that is, since 1919. A populist and a right-wing conservative (with certain Fascist and contradictory tendencies in much of his rhetoric), Sánchez Cerro had a major impact on Peruvian politics of the 1930s.

This impact was evident beginning at 5:00 p.m. on August 27, 1930, when the trimotor airplane of Mr. “Slim” Fawcett landed at the Miraflores Country Club. The upper crust of Lima’s old aristocracy was waiting for Sánchez Cerro as he arrived in the small airplane. Known as El Negro (as he called himself) or “the Hero of Arequipa” (as his military friends called him), Sánchez Cerro was basically unknown to high society in Lima and Miraflores. The fact that a widely respected citizen of Arequipa, Dr. José Bustamante y Rivero (whom the young Mario had met as a boy in Cochabamba), was one of Sánchez Cerro’s advisors added to the latter’s credibility. As he was transported from Miraflores to Lima, eighty thousand people lined the streets of the capital to applaud him. Sánchez Cerro saw signs that proclaimed him Peru’s Segundo Libertador (second liberator, or second Simón Bolívar). The nation needed an end to Leguía’s dictatorship, and Sánchez Cerro seemed to have arrived at just the right time.

It did not take long, however, for Sánchez Cerro, as provisional president, to begin losing his political support. By naming a cabinet consisting of military officers with little political experience, he created doubts among his own generals. In legalizing divorce, Sánchez Cerro also lost the support of the all-powerful Catholic church. His confrontations with the bureaucrats and employees of the Leguía government cost him the support of other followers. Like many military leaders of his generation, Sánchez Cerro saw the workers’ movement as a threat organized by international communism. Thus, once the first strikes broke out at the beginning of his regime, Sánchez Cerro suppressed them even more heavily than had been done during the Leguía presidency. His solution to the politically delicate problem of student unrest was to order the closing of the University of San Marcos (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos).

Sánchez Cerro also confronted the leftist APRA, limiting its political activities and prohibiting the return of its main leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. The “Hero of Arequipa” was convinced that the APRA was an arm of international communism, and this idea found no opposition among the members of the traditional, Catholic, old oligarchy. Worrisome for the traditional oligarchs, however, was Sánchez Cerro’s announcement of his candidacy for permanent president, to be undertaken while he remained in charge of the military and served as provisional president. After several rebellions of the army and the navy, Sánchez Cerro resigned in March 1931. Upon leaving for exile in France, he announced that he would return for the next presidential elections. True to his word, he was back in Peru on July 3, 1931, just in time for the presidential elections, running under the banner of the Unión Revolucionaria (to which Vargas Llosa alludes in La casa verde) against Haya de la Torre. The APRA offered a progressive plan that it identified as a programa mínimo (minimal program). The Unión Revolucionaria offered a plan that, on the surface, seemed similar, but in reality contained ideas and candidates that were far less progressive.

On October 11, 1931, Sánchez Cerro won the election and assumed the presidency of Peru, despite the street fighting and generalized violence that erupted in reaction to his election. The violence continued, and on March 5, 1932, Sánchez Cerro was shot and wounded in a church in Miraflores. The situation degenerated further when government troops massacred between three and five thousand followers of the APRA in Trujillo. Sánchez Cerro was assassinated on April 30, 1933, by a young APRA follower named Abelardo Mendoza Leiva. On his death, the “Hero of Arequipa” owned only a few clothes, some jewelry of little value, a few military medals, and thirty dollars in cash.

Sánchez Cerro remained a local myth for a few years, especially in the neighborhood of Mangachería, where it was claimed that he had been born. The stories about Sánchez Cerro were still being told in Piura when Vargas Llosa was a young boy living in the town; the working-class characters of La Mangachería in La casa verde adore Sánchez Cerro; this caudillo is also mentioned in Historia de Mayta (1984, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta).

La Mangachería was a working-class neighborhood with widespread unemployment because of the crisis among the large landowners (latifundistas) in the region: the landowners could no longer provide housing for the peasants, and as a result slums grew up on the outskirts of Piura.9 With the modernizing of farming technology in the 1920s, these new working-class neighborhoods included La Mangachería and another neighborhood described in La casa verde, La Gallinacera. The majority of the uprooted peasants ended up unemployed or sporadically employed.¹⁰ For the young Vargas Llosa, La Mangachería was the most “original” neighborhood of Piura, with savory food and authentic dishes.¹¹ In 1945 the young Mario began discovering the true empirical reality of Peru, getting to know it beyond the stories of Incas that he had read in the Billiken series of children’s comic books that were circulating in South America in the 1940s. His amazing discoveries about life in general and Peruvian life specifically were not difficult for the young Vargas Llosa to accept, with the possible exception of that new lesson concerning the birth of children.

At the end of the year 1945, the acquisition of an ugly image in place of a formerly poetic vision of human sexuality was followed by a related but more dramatic trauma in his life. His mother took him to a hotel lobby in Piura for an unannounced meeting with someone whom Vargas Llosa had been led to believe was dead: his father, Ernesto Vargas. The background to the surprise meeting between the father and son was that the parents had secretly met and reconciled after Ernesto’s nine-year absence. The father that the young Vargas Llosa met, unfortunately, had nothing in common with the quasi-mythic paternal figure the young Mario had imagined for the first eight years of his life in Cochabamba. He was not the heroic pilot that the entire family had portrayed him to be. Moreover, the personal chemistry was bad between the two from the first words they exchanged in the hotel lobby, and worsened from there. From the hotel, the three of them went for a drive in Ernesto’s car, and ended up in a nearby town, spending the night in a hotel on their way to Lima. While they were on the highway, Ernesto explained the shocking news: the couple had been separated for many years, but now they were back together.

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The newly constituted family—father, mother, and son—moved into the Magdalena middle- and working-class neighborhood of Lima for the first year, and then transferred over to the more comfortable and elegant upper-middle-class district of Miraflores. Originally a summer retreat for the wealthy as an outlying town of Lima in the 1930s, it began its transformation into a residential neighborhood in the 1940s. In the 1950s, when Ernesto Vargas, Dora Llosa de Vargas, and Mario Vargas Llosa moved there, it was at its peak as one of the most elegant residential neighborhoods of the greater Lima area. The three of them lived on the Calle Porta, between Benavides Avenue and Juan Fanning Street. The young Vargas Llosa was now ten minutes from the commercial (and social) center of Miraflores and ten minutes from the Parque Salazar at the beach, his other social center. Nearby was the Calle Diego Ferré, with some of the most ample and luxurious homes of Miraflores. Despite this ideal physical setting, the family situation was a disaster. Vargas Llosa himself has called it the most abnormal home in the world.12 He also describes it as the most bitter period of his life; he lived constantly in fear.

Vargas Llosa began his high school studies in the Colegio LaSalle, completing the first two years from 1947 to 1949. The young boy who had been the little king of the home in Cochabamba now lived with a rigid disciplinarian for a father, one who would not tolerate the childish games of a spoiled child. Ernesto’s discipline involved physical abuse; he sometimes hit his son. Years later, Vargas Llosa wrote of being terrified by his father. The worst moment of the father-son relationship came when Ernesto discovered that Mario was writing poems, an activity that the traditional and conservative Ernesto considered effeminate and related to homosexuality. Consequently, he decided to enroll Mario in the Leoncio Prado military school. (When Vargas Llosa finally published his first poems many years later, as an adult in his seventies, it was perhaps the ultimate rejection of the father, a statement almost as strong as his anti-authoritarian and anti-dictator novels).

The military school was another world. The adolescent Mario’s experience here was comparable to the terror of living at home. The human cruelty of the Leoncio Prado was fictionalized in Vargas Llosa’s first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963, The Time of the Hero). Vargas Llosa has stated that there he discovered violence. Besides the violence, Vargas Llosa discovered Peru. In the Leoncio Prado he found the complete spectrum of a heterogeneous Peruvian society, comprising all social classes and ethnic groups. Consequently, the fourteen-year-old adolescent and future novelist experienced life amid a microcosm of Peru’s complex society that, before entering this school, he had hardly known at all. This was the first of several opportunities—in the end, fortunate ones—that Vargas Llosa had in his life to see all levels of Peruvian society.¹³ Oviedo describes this period in the Leoncio Prado as a time when the young boy was poorly adapted: a period of poor grades and disciplinary punishments in which a young rebel was in the process of being formed.¹⁴ This trauma was so deep that Vargas Llosa has opposed all figures of abusive authority—particularly dictatorial regimes against which he has written in novels and essays—for his entire life and to the depths of his very “being.”¹⁵ Vargas Llosa has described his experience as “a kind of trauma.”¹⁶

In an amusing way, Vargas Llosa also became something of a professional writer in the Leoncio Prado. The other students came to him to write love letters on their behalf, which he did in exchange for cigarettes; for his friends, he provided the service for free.

While in this military school, Vargas Llosa read voraciously; this was when he first read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Books such as this French classic provided an escape from the brutal reality that surrounded him, and this French novel gained a permanent place among the books that the adult Vargas Llosa considers one of the truly great novels. Years later, military school was background for the writing of his book on Hugo’s Les Misérables, La tentación de lo imposible (2004, The Impossible Temptation), and laid the groundwork for his vision of the writer as the producer of lengthy and ambitious “total” novels, as Fuentes would later call them in his 1969 essay, La nueva novela hispano-americana. Les Misérables was Vargas Llosa’s early experience with such vast, totalizing literary projects.

The violence that the young Mario discovered in the Leoncio Prado was, in effect, part of a generalized and broad-based violence about which the adolescent Vargas Llosa had been unaware during his protected life in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Piura, Peru. The 1930s had opened with the violence of Sánchez Cerro’s government, a regime responsible for a massacre in Trujillo and ended by the death of a Peruvian president. The governments of General Oscar  R. Benavides (1933–1939) and Manuel Prado y Ugarteche (1939–1945) were unsuccessful at finding peace with the plethora of groups in conflict.

In March 1945, Dr. José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, Peruvian ambassador in Bolivia (and friend of the Llosa family) accepted the nomination of the FDN (Frente Democrático Nacional) for the presidency of Peru. Bustamante y Rivero sought and attained reconciliation with the APRA. On June 10, 1945, Peru held its cleanest election in decades, and the winner by a vast majority was Dr. Bustamante y Rivero. This lawyer from Arequipa sought a democratic and decentralized government, in contrast with the previous domination of the old oligarchy and the military.17 Bustamante had excellent credentials for this leadership role, including having denounced his position in Sánchez Cerro’s cabinet, once he recognized his dictatorial tendencies. But President Bustamante y Rivero was not able to maintain good relations with the APRA, and political violence was increased during his government, including the assassination of the respected political figure Francisco Graña Garland on January 7, 1947, which caused a national crisis. Bustamante y Rivero also had to face an increasingly serious economic crisis. On October 29, 1948, when Vargas Llosa was a student in the Colegio LaSalle in Lima, President Bustamante y Rivero was deposed from the presidency and taken into exile to Argentina. General Manuel A. Odría, the man who had orchestrated the coup, assumed power. With Odría, the already violent nation entered an even darker stage—comparable in many ways to Vargas Llosa’s experience in the violent microcosm of the Leoncio Prado military school.

From the perspective of Vargas Llosa, the experience of the Leoncio Prado was painful and traumatic. The two years in the Leoncio Prado were difficult and he had some terrible days, including some in which the punishment was not being able to leave school for the weekend.18 After two years, the young Mario convinced his parents to let him return to Piura, where he finished high school in the Colegio Nacional San Miguel. That was where he began his literary career more publicly. At this stage the writer-in-the-making was an enthusiastic reader of Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. In the summer of 1952, before going to Piura, he wrote brief journalistic pieces for the newspaper La Crónica in Lima. He did creative writing in several genres in Piura, including a play, La huida del Inca (The flight of the Inca), which he directed for a performance on July 17, 1952, in the Teatro Variedades of Piura. Years later, after establishing himself as a novelist, he returned to the creation of theater.¹⁹ At a distance from the threat of his father, he published his first poems. He also wrote short pieces for several newspapers, including La Industria in Piura. The other literary importance of the experience in Piura, besides these early writings and the setting for La casa verde, is that it provided the anecdotal material for parts of his first volume of stories, Los jefes (1959).

The year in Piura afforded the young Mario the opportunity to launch his nascent literary career, as well as freeing him from his two major burdens—his father and the Leoncio Prado military school. At the time he returned to Lima in 1953 to begin his studies of letras (literature) at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, the situation in Peru was not good: the entire nation was suffering under the oppressive dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría, which lasted until 1956. Odría was born in the rural area of the mountains (the sierra), in the small town of Tarma, in 1897 and had studied in the military school of Chorrillos, where he had graduated as the top student in 1919. After completing military training in the United States, Odría was named minister of government by President Bustamante y Rivero.

Upon assuming control of the provisional government on October 30, 1948, Odría established an essentially authoritarian regime, proclaiming an estado de sitio (state of emergency) and suspending all the rights and guarantees of the Peruvian constitution. A security law declared in June 1949 allowed numerous abuses of human rights and severely limited freedom of expression and the press. (The fact that Vargas Llosa was working as a part-time journalist during this period might well explain, in part, his lifelong, consistent support of freedom of expression.) Upon being elected “constitutional” president in 1950, Odría launched a comprehensive campaign against the APRA: against labor unions, universities, and armed forces under APRA control. During the first eight months of his government, he incarcerated some four thousand members of the APRA. The APRA leader, Haya de la Torre, went into exile in the Colombian embassy in Lima. The persecution of APRA members, in fact, was one of the main activities of Odría’s government.

During the first two years he was in power, Odría directed a military government that held all executive and legislative power. Once securely at the helm, he announced elections for July of 1950, but without the participation of the APRA or the communists. (Vargas Llosa’s father, Ernesto Vargas, supported Odría, which was probably one reason that, as a student, Vargas Llosa aligned himself with the communists, and belonged to a secret cell of communists.) A few weeks before the election, Odría declared the candidacy of his opposition, Ernesto Montagne, invalid for technical reasons. This declaration caused a rebellion in Arequipa; Odría’s troops killed two hundred there. (A fictionalized version of this uprising appears in Conversación en La Catedral.) The government accused the APRA and the communists of causing this uprising and imprisoned the leader of the rebels. The presidential elections, then, were a “yes” or “no” vote for Odría, and the government reported an 80 percent vote in favor of the dictator.

Odría’s economic plan, in accordance with the recommendation of the U.S. consulting firm Klein-Saks, was for a “free economy.” Odría secured loans from the World Bank and the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, at the same time that he opened the doors to foreign investors. U.S. investment in Peru doubled between 1950 and 1955, reaching $300 million.20 Peru gained recognition in the worldwide capitalist markets for its “respect” for private property and its favorable disposition toward allowing foreign companies to do mining. The government undertook a plan to construct highways and hydroelectric plants. It also launched a plan for the construction of schools.

Despite all the propaganda around those plans, Odría’s military budget was always more robust than the money invested in social programs and the infrastructure. Rumors circulated about corruption at the highest levels of the government, and Odría spent progressively less time governing the nation and increasingly more time in nightclubs. The 1956 elections were won by Manuel Prado, candidate for the Movimiento Democrático Pradista (the Pradista Democratic Movement), putting an end to the ochenio and one of darkest chapters of Peru’s political history.

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In his different jobs the young Vargas Llosa was able to see the dictatorship up close and from a variety of angles. He began his studies of literature and law at San Marcos University at the same time that he held several jobs: assistant to the distinguished historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea; librarian at the Club Nacional; director of information at the Panamerican radio station (an experience that appeared later in the novel La tía Julia y el escribidor [1977, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter]); and collaborator in several magazines. With his studies and all these jobs, Vargas Llosa was working day and night. At least one of these jobs was eminently literary—and the Peruvian author found it to be the most pleasant: working as an assistant in a library in an elegant private club in Lima, browsing through bookshelves and reading books.21 In addition, during this period, for the second time in his life, since his days in the Leoncio Prado, Vargas Llosa lived intensely amid the entire gamut of Peruvian society. While he was living the multiple realities of Peru, from such wide-ranging perspectives as that offered by the newspaper, the one presented at the university, and the one on the radio, he also began reading Faulkner, the master of multiple perspectives in narrative fiction. Understandably enough, the young Vargas Llosa found Faulkner’s fiction of great interest.

For young college students in the 1950s in Peru, attaining social awareness and political consciousness for the first time, certain key readings were, de facto, so common that they were obligatory: Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Manuel González Prada, and José Carlos Mariátegui. At the University of San Marcos, it was not necessary to have actually read these authors to be aware of them—their names and ideas were widely circulated across campus and in the cafés. When he was a student at this university, Vargas Llosa belonged to a communist cell that read and discussed Marx, whose ideas on historical materialism and the class struggle had circulated in Peru since the nineteenth century. In this period, Marx was known by Peruvian intellectuals such as Manuel González Prada (1848–1918), but it was not until the twentieth century that he had any noticeable impact. Young Peruvian intellectuals of the 1950s read Sartre with enthusiasm, and with great interest in his concept of the politically committed—engagé—intellectual; this “commitment” became a trademark idea for Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s who were intellectually formed in the 1950s, with Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes among the most prominent.

It is possible to trace a continuous line of political thought that begins with González Prada and then follows with the Peruvian intellectuals José de la Riva Agüero and Francisco García Calderón to Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. The latter were influenced by a first generation, including, in the nineteenth century, González Prada, who was an aristocratic criollo who rebelled against the dominant Hispanist tradition and promoted an eclectic nationalism, thus turning against most of the basic principles of his own social class in Peru. He had read the European social critics of his time, including Marx, and he organized a literary circle that published La Revista Social between 1885 and 1888. Influenced by European positivists, González Prada attacked the Catholic Church. His ideology was a synthesis of different nationalist and indigenista ideas of this generation of writers, such as Clorinda Matto de Turner, who clamored for an authentic national literature instead of creations imitating European models. Even though he himself was not a Marxist or socialist, González Prada served as a model for later generations, as did Mariátegui.

In some articles published in the magazine Cultura Peruana in 1958, Vargas Llosa exhibited a knowledge of the work of González Prada, who, along with his contemporaries, exercised a great influence on a generation of intellectuals known in Peru as the Generation of 1900. They were readers of European intellectuals such as Maurice Barrés, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, and Herbert Spencer. As students at the University of San Marcos, this generation fought for university reforms. Riva Agüero became a fervent nationalist, but after Leguía’s coup d’état in 1919, he fled to Europe, where he became a fascist. García Calderón, as a typical member of the generation, was an anti-colonialist, a positivist, and a nationalist. Vargas Llosa published essays on García Calderón in 1956 and on Riva Agüero in 1959: they were noteworthy predecessors to Vargas Llosa’s early political thinking.

A major figure for Peruvian students and intellectuals in the 1950s, Mariátegui was an essayist and political activist of the 1920s who died in 1930, at the age of forty. After his initiation into Peruvian politics and journalism in the second decade of the twentieth century, in 1919 Mariátegui went to Paris, where he was involved with political actors, primarily communists and socialists. Even though he had already read some Marx in Peru, more readings in Paris were a revelation for Mariátegui. His subsequent political activism in Peru emerged along with the political work of Haya de la Torre, who founded the APRA in 1924. Despite their often parallel political work, these two major figures of the 1920s distanced themselves from each other in 1928. In the 1920s, Peru’s first generation of leftists were not only assiduous readers of González Prada, Mariátegui, and Haya de la Torre, but also of Leo Tolstoy, Hugo, Henri Barbusse, and Émile Zola.

Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven essays for the interpretation of Peruvian reality) have been a canonical set of essays not only for generations in Peru, but in all of Latin America since their publication in 1928. Even though all of Vargas Llosa’s intellectual forefathers, from González Prada onward, had done their respective analyses of Peru’s national reality, Mariátegui opened his volume of seven essays with what was at the time a new kind of analysis: one based on economic principles. (Ironically, this was Vargas Llosa’s interest in the 1980s: to offer a new kind of analysis using what, at the time, was the new economics.) Based on Marxist principles, however, Mariátegui’s “Esquema de la evolución económica” (Scheme of economic evolution) is a critical analysis of the entire history of Peru, from the supposedly “socialist” society of the Incas to the insertion of British and American interests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays in Mariátegui’s volume are based on concrete economic analysis, a noteworthy undertaking in a period when most considerations of nationhood or national identity had to do more with the “spiritual” or “moral” character of Peruvians, or were attempts to describe the “soul” of the nation. As far as the issue of indigenous peoples, for example, Mariátegui affirmed that the matter of the indigenous people starts with economics.

In résumé, Mariátegui was the first important materialist in Peru, and Vargas Llosa, as a college student in 1956, published a series of articles on this Peruvian thinker and essayist. Even though it might not seem promising today to search for similarities between a classic leftist such as Mariátegui and a classic liberal such as Vargas Llosa, it is interesting to note their commonalities: in both cases, an absent father, a precocious childhood involving writing at a very young age, and a period in journalism followed by another becoming radicalized during a stay in Paris. At the age of thirty, both Mariátegui and Vargas Llosa were radical leftists residing in Paris.

At the age of nineteen, Vargas Llosa rebelled against his family; this first rebellion was more of a personal, adolescent rebellion than a political one. He fell in love with an aunt, Julia Urquidi Illanes, and scandalized his family by marrying her. A distant relative from the Bolivian branch of the Llosa family, Julia was thirty-one years old when the couple decided to elope to a small town south of Lima to get officially married, a scandal to the middle-class conservative Catholic values of his family and most middle-class Peruvians at the time. As was novelized years later in La tía Julia y el escribidor, the adventure of Vargas Llosa’s first marriage was a melodrama for the entire Vargas Llosa family. The newlyweds moved into a small, two-room apartment in Miraflores, and in order for Vargas Llosa to support his new wife, he held seven jobs. One of these required the macabre work of marking graves at a cemetery—the Cementerio General de Lima. Despite his economic difficulties, Vargas Llosa did manage to carry out his first act of rebellion. Soon thereafter, his rebellion dealt directly with his experience in Piura and Lima during the years 1945 to 1955, in the form of his first novel.

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Vargas Llosa’s adolescence afforded him the opportunity for a deep and intense contact with the empirical reality of Peru. The years that followed, from 1956 to 1974, were focused on relentless reading and writing. His adventuresome spirit—in the Vargas tradition—took him to Europe, where he successfully began living the life he had always desired: that of a total commitment to literature. The precocious child became the precocious young writer; the traumatized young boy became the writer who used literature to deal with his traumas.22 In this period from 1956 to 1974 he published his first short stories and his first four novels. The apprentice writer became the celebrity writer of the Hispanic world. He wrote his first stories in Lima between 1953 and 1957, but he lived most of this highly productive period in Europe (from 1958 to 1974) with brief visits to Peru. He read and wrote constantly, while establishing his personal relationships with the writers of the 1960s Boom, headed by Carlos Fuentes (as the intellectual and political leader) and himself (as the precocious novelist).

During the years 1956 and 1957 Vargas Llosa continued his frantic activity, writing for newspapers and magazines at the same time that he edited the political organ Democracia, which offered critique of Odría’s dictatorship. He also worked with Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo on the editing of Cuadernos de Composición (1956–1957, Composition notebooks). His sense of self-discipline and responsibility with respect to his literary work was impressive: throughout this period he was publishing his early writings. In late 1956, Vargas Llosa published his first story, “El abuelo” (The grandfather), in the newspaper El Comercio (December 9, 1956). It is a story that grew out of his experience in Peru, but was also inspired by two of Paul Bowles’s books that Vargas Llosa has described as “beautiful” (bellos) and “perverse”: A Delicate Prey and The Sheltering Sky.23 Two months later, in February of 1957, he published his second story, “Los jefes” (The chiefs) in a separate issue of the magazine El Mercurio Peruano of Lima. It is a story of adolescence, related to an experience in high school in Piura: some boys confront the authorities in the school, creating a moral dilemma among those in leadership roles. The short story re-creates a strike that Vargas Llosa and some of his classmates attempted to organize in school, at the Colegio San Miguel de Piura. Vargas Llosa culminated his first year of short fiction publication by winning a literary prize organized by the Revue Francaise in Paris with the story “El desafío” (The challenge), a story quite distinct from his other early fiction, dealing with a magical, ritualistic fight between two men.

The prize from the Revue Francaise afforded Vargas Llosa the opportunity, at the age of twenty-one, to enjoy two weeks in Paris, with a room in the Hotel Napoleon, from which the young Peruvian could see the Eiffel Tower. Twenty years later, Vargas Llosa recalled this trip as an unforgettable experience full of entertaining episodes.²⁴ He did not succeed in seeing his idol of that period of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre, but he did meet Camus, whom he approached unabashedly as the iconic French writer was exiting from a theatrical representation of his play Les Justes. Mario gave Camus a copy of a literary magazine that he was editing with some young collaborators in Peru, and Camus surprised him with his good Spanish.

With Vargas Llosa’s next trip to Europe in 1958, he began a de facto sixteen-year self-exile, with only brief trips to Peru. After this first stay in Paris, on the return flight, he stopped over in the Peruvian Amazonian jungle, where he spent two weeks traveling with the Mexican anthropologist Juan Comas. This experience in the Amazon was the first step in getting background information and ideas for the early novel La casa verde (1966, The Green House), and eventually useful for the later novels El hablador (1987, The Storyteller), a project of the 1980s, and El sueño del celta (2010, The Dream of the Celt) a project of the twenty-first century. For Vargas Llosa, the Amazonian experience was as eye-opening as it had been to discover the world of the Leoncio Prado military school; he now relearned—on a much larger scale—that the world was not the small and relatively passive place in which he had been living until then. When he went to the Alto Marañón River in the Amazon jungle in Peru, he realized that his nation was something more vast and intimidating than it had ever seemed from the Leoncio Prado.25

The specific historical and cultural background from this Amazonian trip that appears later in La casa verde, El hablador, and El sueño del celta involves the rubber industry in Peru both in the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. From the 1880s onward there had been a worldwide boom in the rubber industry because of the fashionable new mode of transportation that was the bicycle, followed by the automobile industry. Between 1880 and 1920, the Amazon region exported 80 million dollars’ worth of rubber, and the region was second in the world in rubber production from 1902 to 1906. During this rubber boom, the Amazonian city of Iquitos prospered in ways comparable to the banana boom in the Caribbean region of Colombia in the early twentieth century, or to the Gold Rush in California in the nineteenth century. This jungle town of Iquitos hosted twenty-five thousand inhabitants, consuls of ten nations, and a luxury hotel (the Malecón Palace) that was constructed with material imported from Paris.

Just a few companies controlled most of the rubber industry; they had obtained concessions from the government to exploit trees of the genus Hevea that were tended by indigenous peoples and mestizos. In addition to the typical exploitation of rural workers well known in Latin America, there was extreme abuse in some cases that would be most appropriately described as slavery. Vargas Llosa got a brief glimpse of the history of this slavery while in the jungle in 1958; this glimpse and the reading of Conrad decades later led him on the path to investigating the operations of the rubber magnate Julio C. Arana in Peru and the eventual writing of El sueño del celta.

Beginning in 1915, the rubber industry declined in Peru as precipitously as it had arisen. The demise was caused primarily by Asian competition—there had been a rebirth of the rubber industry in Indonesia—but Arana’s empire also came under the constant questioning of British authorities after the British envoy Roger Casement submitted a report on the abuses in Peru. Thus, prosperity in Iquitos vanished as quickly as had the “leafstorm” in the banana region of Colombia. Both these periods of the rubber industry in Peru appear in La casa verde; the reader of this novel also sees the period immediately after the second boom, when rubber was no longer a profitable enterprise.

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The region that Vargas Llosa visited in 1958 was in the department of Loreto, which has Iquitos as its capital. The Amazon River dominates the region and, as the young Peruvian discovered, is vast in proportions. A traveler claimed in 1914 that the area is so vast that different species of animals inhabit the two riverbanks.26 Until well into the twentieth century the indigenous groups of this region were little known and often mistreated. An early-twentieth-century traveler, demonstrating the racism that is typical of the period, characterized them as insects: “A tribe depends on just one type of tree, just as insects depend on one type of fruit or leaf to survive.”²⁷

The indigenous groups that Vargas Llosa found inhabiting the region in 1958 included the Aguarunas, the Huambisas, the Achuar, and the Shuar, which belong to the ethnic group that the Spaniards had identified as la gran nación jíbara (“the great jíbaro nation”). In his novels Vargas Llosa mentions specifically the Aguarunas, the Huambisas, and the Shakras. There are approximately twenty-five thousand indigenous people in the part of the Amazon basin that Vargas Llosa initially visited, the region of the Alto Marañón River as well as its tributaries, the Nieva River, the Santiago River, and the Cenepa River. The Huambisas live to the north of the region that Vargas Llosa saw in 1958, near Ecuador, along the Santiago River; this is one area of Arana’s rubber operation about which Vargas Llosa wrote much later in El sueño del celta. The Aguaranas, like most of their counterparts in the Peruvian Amazon basin, live in semi-permanent villages, typically with about 150 inhabitants. They are known to be good fighters, and practice the shrinking of the skulls of their enemies.

Upon his return from Paris and the Amazon jungle, Vargas Llosa published a report, under the title “Crónica de un viaje a la selva” (Chronicle of a trip to the jungle) in the magazine Cultura Peruana. His more important writing based on his experience in the jungle appeared in print eight years later, with the publication of La casa verde. In 1958, Vargas Llosa directed another literary magazine with his friends Luis Loayza and Abelardo Oquendo under the title Literatura, a project that lasted one year. The first issue of the magazine (February 1958) featured poems by the Peruvian poet César Moro, a note on Moro by Vargas Llosa, and brief articles by André Coyné, Carlos Germán Belli, Javier Sologuren, and José Durán. At the end of this first issue is a note by the Peruvian fiction writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy that is titled “Mao Tse Tung between Poetry and Revolution,” an obvious indicator that this was a progressive, leftist-leaning group of young intellectuals.

Vargas Llosa completed his undergraduate studies in 1958 at the University of San Marcos with a degree in humanities and a thesis titled “Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío” (Foundations for an interpretation of Rubén Darío). His mentor in Peru, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, professor of history and senator who had supported him during his difficult economic years in the 1950s, helped him obtain a scholarship in Spain for graduate study in literature at the Complutense University of Madrid (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). When the twenty-two-year-old left Lima for Madrid, it was with the intention of dedicating himself to reading and writing, creative activities that in the end were frequently related to his traumas and “demons” from his life experience in the 1940s and 1950s.

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In Madrid, Mario and his wife, Julia, lived on the Calle del Doctor Castelo, near the Parque del Retiro, while Vargas Llosa pursued his doctoral studies in literature (the Facultad de Letras) at the Complutense University. During his year in Madrid (1958–1959), he was awarded the Leopoldo Alas Prize, a Spanish literary award, for his volume of short stories Los jefes. Having been in Paris on his first trip to Europe, he hardly found Franco’s Madrid an attractive city. Rather, the young Vargas Llosa found it to be provincial, with heavy censorship and other limits. His typical routine in Madrid was to attend classes or study at the Biblioteca Nacional in the morning and to do his creative work—including writing the initial pages of his first novel—in the afternoon.

The young writer had arrived in Madrid with the specific idea in mind to somehow write a novel about his experience in the Leoncio Prado military school in Lima. His first small working notebook, in which he wrote in July and August of 1958, contained just five pages on Rubén Darío (his real and immediate work as a graduate student) but some eighty-five pages of his first draft of La ciudad y los perros (1963, The Time of the Hero). As it happens, all of Vargas Llosa’s books have been written this way, with handwritten first drafts in notebooks (see the epilogue for further discussion of Vargas Llosa and his notebooks). In Madrid he spent many afternoons in a tasca called El Jute, and in this bar he did his writing by hand. Afterward, he would go home and use his typewriter to transcribe his manuscript. It was in Spain that this graduate student of twenty-three years of age made the first of several decisions on the direction of his life: “voy a tratar de ser escritor” (“I am going to try to be a writer”).28 Having made that resolution, he worked on those initial pages of La ciudad y los perros in Madrid and then took his partial first draft with him to Paris in 1960.

When his scholarship ended after a year in Madrid, Mario and Julia left for Paris, the young graduate student convinced that he also had a scholarship to study in France. Of course, to live in Paris had been a childhood dream since his first readings of Dumas and Hugo. Desiring to study in Paris, he had written to the minister of foreign affairs in Peru requesting support for a scholarship. The minister assured him that a scholarship would be forthcoming and encouraged him to go to Paris. Once Vargas Llosa had settled in and finally saw the official list of grantees, however, his name was not on it. His plan—to study in Paris for a year and then return to Lima—changed: now he had to work to survive in Paris. Despite the economic difficulties that he suffered during the first few months there, he had unforgettable literary experiences, too: he purchased his first copy of Madame Bovary in French, fell in love with the novel, and years later wrote a book about the love affair under the title La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary (1975, The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary). This was also the period in which he read the other French and European novelists that became the most important writers of his life, after Flaubert and Faulkner: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Hugo.

Between 1960 and 1964 the young Peruvian couple lived in several neighborhoods in Paris. At the beginning, they were in a small room in the Hotel Wetter, near the Cluny Museum, where they lived uncomfortably. Vargas Llosa was able to continue his work there: he reread Sartre, Flaubert, and Faulkner, and returned to that eighty-five-page manuscript that he had handwritten in Madrid for the novel that would eventually be titled La ciudad y los perros (Vargas Llosa had another preferred title, Los impostores, until the book was published). He spent his time in Paris writing his novels, publishing political and literary essays, and holding various jobs. He taught Spanish in the Berlitz School, worked for France Press and, later, for French radio-television.

La ciudad y los perros was mostly written in Paris in 1960 and 1961. The novel deals with his traumatic experience in the Leoncio Prado military school, but also reflects the author’s ongoing readings of Sartre and Faulkner. In this period, Vargas Llosa’s friend Luis Loayza called the author “el Sartrecillo valiente,” or “the valiant little Sartre.”²⁹ The early 1960s were stimulating and active years for Vargas Llosa in many important aspects of his life: what he was reading, what he was writing, and whom he was meeting. He read French literature obsessively: he tells of buying the thirteen tomes of Flaubert’s Correspondences in 1962. The essays that Vargas Llosa published in the early 1960s were on Camus (1962), Cuba (1962), Javier Heraud (1963), Sartre (1964), Hugo (1964), Hemingway (1964), Simone de Beauvoir (1964), and Luis Loayza (1964). (Later, in his 1984 novel, Historia de Mayta, he refers to the Peruvian poet and revolutionary Javier Heraud.)

He published two essays on his trip to Cuba in October 1962, where he had been sent by the French press to cover the missile crisis in Cuba. The two reports that Vargas Llosa wrote from Cuba were very favorable toward the Cuban Revolution. From these reports, it is evident that he was fascinated with the cultural heterogeneity of the island and the support the Cuban people gave their leader, Fidel Castro. Vargas Llosa also observed with great interest the new discipline of the Cuban people and their commitment to the Cuban Revolution.

In addition to these reports from Cuba, Vargas Llosa’s brief reflections on Sartre, Camus, and Javier Heraud are noteworthy in retrospect for their political content, for these are the writings of a fervent young leftist revolutionary in 1962. Despite being a great admirer of Sartre, Vargas Llosa chose to disagree with Sartre’s claim that it is more important for a Third World intellectual to teach an illiterate to read than to write a novel. Upon reading this statement by Sartre, in fact, Vargas Llosa was offended. And despite having been an avid reader of Camus since the early 1950s, Vargas Llosa described him in his 1962 essay as a fine novelist who, in the end, was an inferior thinker and philosopher. Vargas Llosa’s article on the Peruvian poet and guerrilla leader Javier Heraud offered warm support of Heraud’s efforts, and Vargas Llosa used the case of Heraud to make the claim that Peru had reached the limits of its status quo and needed radical change.

During his early years in France, Vargas Llosa met numerous Latin American writers. In the early 1960s, he got together with Julio Cortázar; this was before the Argentine writer’s revolutionary period, which began in the mid-1960s. In fact, Cortázar was one of the first Latin American writers Vargas Llosa met in Paris; their first encounter was in December 1958 in the home of a mutual friend, Alfonso de Silva. They became increasingly good friends over the years, and Cortázar offered an early reading and commentary of the manuscript of La ciudad y los perros. Cortázar was helpful to Vargas Llosa in those early years, and although the Argentine writer had the reputation of being reserved and distant from most intellectuals, he and Vargas Llosa became intimate friends over the years. By the 1970s, Cortázar had become a political writer and committed leftist, and Vargas Llosa, the fervent revolutionary of the early 1960s, was increasingly critical of the leftist intellectuals, particularly the Cuban regime, on matters of human rights and censorship. Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa and Cortázar remained intimate friends until the latter’s untimely death in 1984.

As a broadcaster on French radio-television, Vargas Llosa interviewed not only Cortázar but several other Latin American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. With respect to Borges, Vargas Llosa has always spoken in the highest of terms of all his encounters with Borges the writer and Borges the person, including the first interview in the early 1960s. Before that interview, Vargas Llosa had heard the Argentine master deliver a lecture on fantastic literature; the lecture had left him stunned.30 With respect to that other luminary of the Boom, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa had met the brash and rebellious young Mexican writer in Mexico in the early 1960s. They met at a party in Mexico City in 1962. Fuentes wrote in 1963, after the publication of La ciudad y los perros, that the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, the Argentine Cortázar, and the Peruvian Vargas Llosa were the major contemporary novelists of Latin America.³¹

After completing La ciudad y los perros, Vargas Llosa had difficulties in publishing this first novel. His friend Sebastián Salazar Bondy sent the manuscript to an Argentine publisher that promptly rejected it. The Spanish editor Carlos Barral suggested to the young Peruvian that he send it to a novel prize competition in Spain, the Premio Biblioteca Breve. Despite his initial reluctance to follow this suggestion, Vargas Llosa decided to give it a try. Soon thereafter, a committee consisting of José María Castellet, José María Valverde, Víctor Seix Barral, Carlos Barral, and Juan Petit awarded Mario Vargas Llosa the prize. After this, the work of Mario Vargas Llosa would never again be unknown. Once the novel appeared in print in Spanish in October of 1963, it was an immediate success. In Spain, it was awarded another prize, the Premio de la Crítica Española (Spanish critics’ prize); in France, it received second place in the Prix Formentor competition. In Peru, however, rather than receiving awards, La ciudad y los perros produced scandals. At the Leoncio Prado military school, for example, a thousand copies of the novel were burned in a public ceremony.

Indeed, the novel did not portray this Peruvian military institution in a positive light. On the one hand, the use of vulgar language and the presence of nontraditional sexual practices offended all those who protected traditional Catholic, military, and middle-class values in Peru. For the old oligarchy in Peru, traditionally allied with the military, La ciu dad y los perros was an offensive questioning of military authority and ethics. For Vargas Llosa and many of his readers, however, La ciudad y los perros presented a reasonably accurate microcosm of Peruvian society. The military school did, in fact, recruit and offer scholarships to young boys from all sectors of Peruvian society. As we have seen, for the adolescent Vargas Llosa, whose experience of Peru had been limited to Piura and the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Miraflores in Lima, this insight into the ethnic, cultural, and social milieu of Peru had been a revelation.

La ciudad y los perros is Vargas Llosa’s first but not most ambitious Faulknerian project. Like Faulkner, Vargas Llosa constructs a multilayered novel using a series of fragments with varying time lines, consisting of eighty-one narrative segments that appear in two parts and an epilogue. Each of the two parts contains eight chapters, and these chapters generally consist of four or five narrative segments. One chapter has only one narrative segment, two chapters have ten narrative segments, and the epilogue and three other chapters contain three narrative segments. This complex structure also features a variety of narrators within and outside the story. Approximately one-third of the novel consists of first-person narrations—thirty-six of eighty-one segments.

The event that sets the novel in motion is the theft of a chemistry examination by Cava, a student in the Leoncio Prado military school. Unable to identify the culprit in the robbery, the school authorities confine all the cadets to their barracks indefinitely. After enduring confinement for several weeks, and consequently unable to visit his girlfriend on the weekend, one of the cadets, nicknamed Slave (Ricardo Arana), reveals the thief’s identity to the school officials in exchange for the right to leave the premises. The school subsequently expels Cava.

Jaguar, the aggressive leader of the youths in the school, along with his peers, suspects that someone has betrayed them. Soon thereafter, Slave is shot during some practice military maneuvers. Even though Jaguar appears to be guilty of the crime, the school officials conclude that the death was accidental, caused by Slave’s own rifle. Slave’s only friend, Alberto, is aware of the animosity Jaguar held toward Slave and tells officials of the murder. Those in the upper echelon of the school hierarchy prefer to conceal the scandal that would inevitably follow a revelation of the facts. Alberto had written pornographic stories to sell to his peers; school officials use their knowledge of this to blackmail him into silence. The one officer who seems morally capable of questioning the situation, Gamboa, finds his career prospects ruined when he is sent to an isolated post in the provinces. An epilogue tells of the main characters’ lives and careers after leaving the military school.

As in many of Faulkner’s novels, in La ciudad y los perros an intricate pattern of plot development and the different temporal and spatial planes of reality make even an understanding of the series of events and relationships among characters a challenging intellectual experience. In all of his novels, as in this first one, suspense and plot development are essential to the reader’s experience. The novel presents itself to the reader as a box of secrets that eventually opens, revealing one after another. The minor and major questions involve both a moral questioning and a puzzle to be solved. The cadets’ internal world is also one of secrets; it is one cadet’s failure to keep a secret that, in the end, is the main catalyst in the novel’s action. In this way, as in Faulkner, Vargas Llosa develops a parallel between theme, structure, and the reader’s experience: all are predicated on the issue of secrecy and solving the enigmas created by this hermetic process.

Also as in much of Faulkner, a significant factor in the reader’s experience is the author’s use of a variety of narrators. The multiple first-person narrations and remaining third-person narrations are not uniform in their revelation of either the interior psychological realities of the characters or the presentation of exterior social reality. The novel features three narrators who function also as characters within the story: Alberto, Boa, and Jaguar. Alberto’s narration is particularly important because of his central role in the novel. His narrative segments are also a combination of the two basic modes of both first and third person. This presentation of Alberto renders him someone whom the reader constantly judges: the dialogue between characters and between discourses makes Alberto a complex character and reveals his inconsistencies.

Critics of this novel have correctly viewed its fictional world as a microcosm of Peruvian society. The novel portrays a hierarchical society in which all social relations operate on the basis of dominance or coercion. The value of the text as a denunciation of certain characteristics of Peruvian and Latin American society, however, should not obscure the fact that the use of narrative point of view and other subjectifying factors—what Vargas Llosa calls the elemento añadido, or “added element”—are essential to the total experience of the novel.

The structure and point of view of La ciudad y los perros are effective vehicles for both depicting the world of the Leoncio Prado military school (this microcosm of Peru) and inviting the reader to participate actively in this creation. Neither this type of structure nor the use of point of view was, in 1963, in itself an innovation. Vargas Llosa had learned well the lessons from Faulkner, using them to tell the story of his traumatic experience as an adolescent. At the end of the novel, however, the Peruvian writer explores a technique of telescoping time that he had found in a passage of Madame Bovary.32 In a conversation in the epilogue of La ciudad y los perros between Skinny Higueras and Jaguar, for example, the dialogue moves immediately to a previous conversation between Teresa and Jaguar, with no written indicator of the temporal jump. This is a Flaubertian technique that allows for the reader’s direct participation in the events presented. The reader of Vargas Llosa’s novels makes adjustments in the reading process to understand these passages, temporarily suspending traditional assumptions about how dialogue works. Narrative techniques such as this telescoping of time, specific to the fiction of Flaubert and now Vargas Llosa, are more fully exploited in his next two full-length novels, La casa verde (1966) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969).

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Upon completing La ciudad y los perros in 1962, Vargas Llosa was already working on La casa verde. The author’s technical repertoire was now relatively complete in the sense that, by the time he finished La ciudad y los perros, he had found his ways to appropriate the Faulknerian and Flaubertian methods that he needed to tell his own very personal (traumatic) and very Peruvian (critical) story.

Before being able to further pursue the writing of La casa verde, however, Vargas Llosa needed to learn more about the Amazon jungle region of Peru that he had first seen briefly in 1958. He returned to Peru in 1964 primarily to revisit the jungle before completing La casa verde. He arranged the trip so that he would be accompanied by the Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar. In consultation with Matos Mar, Vargas Llosa took copious notes on the area occupied by the Aguarunas, the Shakras, and the Huambisas in the region of the town of Santa María de Nieva. He spoke with leaders of these local tribes and learned that the situation was still highly problematic in the Peruvian jungle because of the exploitation and abuses of the indigenous peoples by the rubber companies. At this time Vargas Llosa also saw indigenous people actually captured by government soldiers and turned over to Catholic missions to be taught Christianity and become “civilized.” Once they were “civilized,” paradoxically, they had no place in either their own former tribes, whose customs they had learned to despise, or in white and mestizo Peruvian society. They would usually be sent to government officials or merchants, destined to be maids or to hold menial jobs. Those who successfully traveled to Lima would be, at best, cooks or, at worst, prostitutes in the capital.

Vargas Llosa also learned of the business dealings of the jungle. He met an Aguarana Indian chief named Jum—the same name that will appear in the novel. Jum had been tortured and humiliated by the government soldiers because he had organized the Indians’ rubber commerce in a way that circumvented profits by the (white) middlemen.

Another important character in La casa verde, Fushía, was a legend of the jungle whom Vargas Llosa never met but about whom everyone spoke. He was a Japanese merchant who had installed a type of feudal kingdom in the jungle—terrorizing the local indigenous people and exploiting them for their rubber and other merchandise. The case of this particular real-life jungle figure offers a notable example of the peculiar symbiosis between social reality and literary invention: Fushía’s name is confused in both Vargas Llosa’s personal experience and in the novel. The name of this legendary Japanese power-broker was in fact “Tushía.” During the writing process, Vargas Llosa explains in his “secret history,” the “T” of his name was converted into an “F” and the real “Tushía” became a fictional “Fushía.” Tellingly enough, the characters in the novel eventually confuse his name in the same fashion. Near the end of the third part of La casa verde, a lieutenant searching for Fushía asks “What’s his name? Tushía? Fushía?” Soon thereafter, the lieutenant asks, “[W]here had that Tushía hidden? Everything in due time, or Fushía, where was he?”33

In March 1966 Vargas Llosa published La casa verde, arguably his best novel but, at the least, broadly recognized by critics and scholars as one of his major works. Readers familiar with his earlier work immediately recognized the more exhaustive use of telescoped dialogues—far more elaborate than in the fiction of Flaubert. La casa verde consists of four parts and an epilogue, each of which is preceded by a section that could be considered a prologue (although it is not identified as such in the text). Parts I, III, and the epilogue contain four chapters. Parts II and IV have three. The chapters of parts I and II contain five narrative segments; those of parts III and IV have four narrative segments. The novel in parts I through IV, then, consist of sixty-three narrative segments, which are generally four to six pages in length.

The plot of La casa verde, and its uncanny unfolding, can be likened to the fluvial webs of the Amazon, with its maze of main rivers, tributaries, and small streams, now joining unexpectedly, now virtually disappearing in the thick undergrowth. Despite the weaving of its many stories, the novel offers two broad settings that correspond to two general plots.

In the first setting, Piura, in northern Peru, a young man named Anselmo arrives and, after becoming well acquainted with Piura’s inhabitants and ways of life, builds the Green House in the desert on the outskirts of the town. Despite the protests of Father García, the new brothel flourishes. Anselmo kidnaps a blind orphan girl, Antonia, and keeps her in the house, where he fathers the child that causes Antonia’s death in childbirth. The outraged Father García and the women of Piura burn down the Green House. Eventually a second Green House appears in the city proper. Chunga, Anselmo’s daughter by Antonia, is the owner of this night bar. The old Anselmo plays in an orchestra there regularly. The character Lituma challenges a friend, Seminario, to a game of Russian roulette, and the latter’s death results in Lituma’s incarceration. (The always-unfortunate Lituma appears later in Vargas Llosa’s fiction.) His wife, Bonifacia, is seduced by one of his friends and eventually works in Chunga’s Green House as a prostitute.

The second setting and main plot, seemingly unrelated to the first, involves the story of indigenous peoples, merchants, government officials, and missionaries in the region of Santa María de Nieva in the Amazon. Government soldiers bring young indigenous girls to the nuns for education at a mission in Santa María. The governor, Reátegui, operates a profitable business by trading for rubber and other goods at a very favorable rate of exchange and then selling the goods in the city of Iquitos. Reátegui tortures the Indian chief Jum for attempting to sell his own goods. One of the several voices that narrate stories related to all these events on the Amazon is that of Fushía. He tells his friend Aquilino of all his operations and the key events of his life.

The connection between the two settings of La casa verde is provided by the presence of Lituma as a soldier in the Amazon and his marriage to Bonifacia, who first appeared in the jungle when she was a young indigenous girl living in the mission in Santa María de Nieva. This overview of the novel’s plot in a general sense suggests obvious parallels with Vargas Llosa’s anecdotes of his “secret history.” His elaboration of the story as a novel—his use of what he calls the “added element,” elemento añadido—however, makes the experience of reading the novel radically different from what this brief résumé of the plot might suggest.

Following up on his use of Flaubert’s telescoped dialogue at the end of La ciudad y los perros, Vargas Llosa expands the use of this technique in La casa verde, making it more complex and considerably more frequent than in his first novel, and probably far beyond anything that even Flaubert had ever imagined. Early in La casa verde, in the first Fushía segment, a dialogue between Fushía and Aquilino develops quickly into a telescoped dialogue, with the intercalation of a previous dialogue between Chango and Iricuo. After this interchange, telescoping appears regularly in the Fushía segments and occasionally in other narrative segments. This technique has two effects. On the one hand, the use of actual dialogue from the past—rather than a character’s observation of it—makes the reader’s experience with even the remote past direct. Unlike novels that present some anecdotes directly and others as indirect experience, La casa verde presents the reader with a constant and direct confrontation with multiple planes of reality. On the other hand, this technique of telescoping dialogues creates juxtapositions of an occasionally contradictory and paradoxical nature: the reader experiences a capricious reality that seems to be perpetually relative to circumstances and the subjectivity of the individual speaking.

In addition to developing the narrative techniques of Faulkner and Flaubert beyond what these two writers had ever done themselves, Vargas Llosa uses a diversity of styles to achieve a broad range of effects. Many traditional forms of written language, such as the traditional sentence and paragraph structure, are dramatically transformed into new forms in La casa verde. The controlling, omniscient narrator occasionally describes the physical setting in a language wrought with images. Metaphorical language suggests the atmosphere of Piura and the jungle, respectively; these scenes are compelling not because of any particularly innovative narrative technique, but as the result of a thoroughly traditional use of suggestive language. The author’s handling of the scene in which Fushía and Aquilino part for the last time is revealing. In this scene, Aquilino observes Fushía in the rain in the jungle. As Aquilino continues withdrawing, he sees “A small pile of living and bloody flesh” that remains motionless in the distance.34 Then Aquilino runs toward some cabins and the passage ends as follows: “It is raining very hard now.”³⁵ This is Fushía’s death scene. We note, however, that the death is only suggested by the momentary portrayal of Fushía as a motionless object. In this passage and throughout the book, Vargas Llosa equates physical nature and human beings by means of language that emphasizes neither: both nature and persons are portrayed by means of only brief exterior descriptions.

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As an active participant in the 1960s Boom, Vargas Llosa traveled extensively and assumed an active role as a public intellectual throughout Latin America in the middle of the decade; increasingly, this was his new public life.36 His personal life changed in the mid-1960s, too: he divorced Julia in 1964 (after a brief separation and reconciliation in 1962), and married Patricia Llosa, a distant relative whom Mario had known since their childhood years. They were married on May 29, 1965, in the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Lima. The next day, they traveled to southern Peru, to Arequipa, where they spent a few days with Patricia’s parents. Then they headed to Paris, stopping on the way in Rio de Janeiro, where Mario saw a Brazilian soccer match during the layover. Once they arrived in Paris, they moved into an apartment on the Avenue du Parc des Expositions, where Vargas Llosa finished the novelette Los cachorros (“The Cubs,” which he had begun in late 1965) and where they remained until early 1966, when the novelist went to Buenos Aires to serve on the jury for a novel prize given by Sudamericana—the Primera Plana. Patricia returned to Lima for the birth of their first child, Álvaro, in March.

The first edition of Los cachorros, with photographs by Xavier Mise rachs, appeared in 1967. It is the story of an adolescent boy who is attacked by a large dog, and suffers the destruction of his genitals; the remainder of the story deals with his change of personality and difficulties in life.

With his newfound celebrity, Vargas Llosa found it increasingly difficult to protect his privacy and work without interruptions while living in Paris. Consequently, in late 1966 he and Patricia moved to London, where they settled first in the neighborhood of Cricklewood, in the northern part of the city, and then later in Earl’s Court in the southwest, where they lived in a Georgian home. In London, Vargas Llosa taught some classes at Queen Mary University of London at the same time that he continued his work on Conversación en La Catedral and wrote chronicles for the Peruvian magazine Caretas about his experiences in Great Britain. In a piece titled “Visita a Karl Marx” (Visit to Karl Marx), he relates the experience of walking around the Soho district on Dean Street, where Marx lived several years, impoverished, with his family. Despite his limited economic means, Marx went daily to the British Museum to write what would become his major work. Vargas Llosa used this pedestrian excursion through Marx’s Soho as an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between writing and material wealth. Indeed, it was a pertinent subject for him, for even though he was not as impoverished as Marx during the early years in London, Mario and Patricia did live a modest existence. Perhaps even more noteworthy is the parallel between Marx’s economic conditions while writing his major work in London and Vargas Llosa’s borderline poverty in Paris while writing La ciudad y los perros and La casa verde. We say that Flaubert and Faulkner were Vargas Llosa’s principle technical models, and Marx could well be considered his model for exercising Spartan intellectual discipline while living a minimal economic existence.

Never before in his life had Vargas Llosa enjoyed public visibility as he did in 1967, quite possibly the most interesting year as a public intellectual in his career. Important in his personal life that year was the birth in September of their second child, Gonzalo, in Lima. Another personal highlight was a trip Vargas Llosa took with Julio Cortázar to Greece as a translator for UNESCO. This oft-cited trip solidified a lifetime relationship with Cortázar that, as mentioned, survived their growing political differences of the 1970s. With respect to Vargas Llosa’s visibility as a public intellectual, he appeared in a public forum in Paris—in the Palais de la Mutualité—with the two most prominent French intellectuals of the 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, all three speaking in defense of Peruvian dissident Hugo Blanco, a guerrilla leader from Cuzco who had been a political activist since 1958. (Vargas Llosa later focused on this early period of armed guerrilla insurrection in his novel Travesuras de la niña mala [2006, Bad Girl]).

Blanco had begun his political activism as a campesino leader, organizing strikes and invasions of the land of the old aristocracy. In November of 1962 he attacked a police station in Cuzco and was alleged to have killed a police officer. A national campaign to capture Blanco culminated in his imprisonment in May 1963; he was condemned to twenty-five years in prison. In the same month, the young poet Javier Heraud—about whom Vargas Llosa wrote essays in support—returned from Cuba with a brigade of guerrilla fighters trained by Castro’s government. The armed insurrection and related political activities organized by Blanco, Heraud, and other guerrilla leaders created local crises and sometimes violent confrontations with the government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1963–1968), which had followed the government of Manuel Prado (1956–1962) and a military junta (1962–1963). Prado’s government, upon taking over the power from the Odría dictatorship in 1956, established a convivencia (peace agreement) with the APRA and immediately eliminated all the politically repressive laws of the Odría regime. But Prado was weak on the much-needed agrarian reforms in a nation where the same large landowners (latifundistas) had possession of land that they had not used productively and efficiently for centuries. The economic program of Belaúnde Terry was more progressive on land reform, but still did not successfully create peace and economic justice on the rural front. To the contrary, the government’s failures resulted in the formation of even more armed guerrilla activity, producing in 1965 the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or Leftist Revolutionary Movement), organized by Luis de la Puente Uceda, and the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or Army of National Liberation), headed by Héctor Béjar.

This complex and difficult panorama of early 1960s Peru was the backdrop for Vargas Llosa’s commentary at La Mutualité in the presence of Sartre and Beauvoir, as well as for the novel Historia de Mayta.

Vargas Llosa’s other activities as a high-visibility public intellectual in Latin America took place in Caracas, Bogotá, and Lima in 1967. On August 4, 1967, Vargas Llosa delivered his acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas; at the time, this was the most prestigious literary prize of the Spanish language. The other celebrity intellectuals of the Boom and related to the Boom, such as Gabriel García Már quez and Ángel Rama, took part in the festivities in Caracas that evening, when Vargas Llosa delivered one of his most powerful public lectures, “La literatura es fuego” (Literature is fire). In this period, the Uruguayan critics Ángel Rama and Emir Rodríguez Monegal were writing enthusiastic essays about the new phenomenon of the “Boom” of the Latin American novel.

Vargas Llosa opened his lecture in Caracas with a moving reference to an overlooked Peruvian poet, Carlos Oquendo de Amat. This poet, who died in relative obscurity, seemed to embody the spirit of Peruvian writers and intellectual activists in general: like Oquendo de Amat, they had delivered their poetic or political message, were perhaps briefly noted in Peru, and inevitably died unknown. Many of the literary and political figures that Vargas Llosa admired and about whom he had written were, in fact, Oquendo de Amat figures. “Literature is fire,” however, was not an entirely pessimistic lecture about the failures of Peruvian intellectuals. To the contrary, the thirty-one-year-old Vargas Llosa offered an equally moving revolutionary tone in the remainder of his speech, calling on the Latin American writer to assume his role as a political agent and supporter of radical social change. Thus, literature, according to Vargas Llosa, could be fire. This was, clearly, the speech of a Peruvian intellectual who had grown up reading Mariátegui and who still held Sartre as an idol. (Years later, Vargas Llosa has recognized that much of his revolutionary writing of the 1960s, which he now rejects, was a paraphrasing of Sartre’s essays on politics and literature.)

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Vargas Llosa and García Márquez had corresponded by letter before that August, but it was in Caracas at the Rómulo Gallegos festivities that they met in person for the first time, and they seemed to get along very well from the beginning. In the month leading up to the meeting in Caracas, García Márquez had suddenly become a celebrity in his own right, as the Argentine edition (Sudamericana) of Cien años de soledad was selling as an instant bestseller in a manner unprecedented in the Hispanic world. After the activities in Caracas, Vargas Llosa and García Márquez traveled together to Bogotá, where the cultural center (and journal) Letras Nacionales offered an homage to Vargas Llosa. Many of the most important intellectuals in Colombia at the time—Jorge Zalamea, León de Greiff, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, and Manuel Zapata Olivella—attended this event.

This trip to Colombia was memorable for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the series of events during those months (publication of Cien años de soledad; Rómulo Gallegos Prize and acceptance speech; homage in Bogotá; the dialogue in Lima) made this period of 1967 arguably the zenith of the 1960s Boom of the Latin American novel. On the other hand, the trip to Bogotá marked the symbolic birth of another of Vargas Llosa’s books, his exhaustive critical study of García Márquez’s entire work up to 1970. In the early 1970s, Vargas Llosa’s research and writing culminated in his publication of García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (García Márquez: history of a deicide), the most informed early study of García Márquez’s work.37 In September Vargas Llosa and García Márquez traveled from Bogotá to Lima, where they engaged in a public dialogue on politics and literature. In this discussion, they set forth together what became some of their most-cited statements as socially and politically committed writers favoring a radical transformation of the old structures of Latin American society. Again, much of the language they employed had its roots in Sartre’s essays on the engagé intellectual. Their dialogue appeared in print in Spanish under the title La novela en América Latina: Diálogo (1968). By the time Vargas Llosa left Lima in late 1967, he had conceived of two new writing projects: the critical study on García Márquez and his third novel, Conversación en La Catedral, the latter of which he began writing in Lima.

In early 1968, Vargas Llosa visited Ireland (a nation which became important decades later for the writing of El sueño del celta), Finland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Spain. The writers of the Boom traveled together through the old Soviet bloc; Vargas Llosa was with Fuentes, García Márquez, and other Latin American writers. In general, their enthusiasm for the Soviet model waned after experiencing firsthand the quality of daily life in Eastern Europe in 1968. After this trip, Vargas Llosa returned to London, where he continued working on Conversación en La Catedral.

Vargas Llosa and Patricia moved to Pullman, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States in the autumn of 1968. The writer had accepted his first teaching position in the States as a visiting professor (his official title was “artist in residence”) at Washington State University. His translator into German, Wolfgang A. Luchting, was a member of the faculty in Washington and had nominated Vargas Llosa for this position; this isolated, provincial campus lacked the cultural life not only of Paris or London, but even of Lima. During this semester-long stay, Vargas Llosa worked on Conversación en La Catedral, taught a graduate seminar on García Márquez, delivered three public lectures, and often spoke in the hallways of his admiration for Flaubert.38 The graduate seminar at Washington State on García Márquez afforded Vargas Llosa the opportunity to work on the García Márquez project at the same time that he fulfilled his teaching duties and dedicated himself daily to the writing of what would be the most lengthy of his novels, Conversación en La Catedral. Living in a home rented from a faculty member on leave, Vargas Llosa submerged himself in the basement each morning to work on his third novel.

The public lectures delivered on the campus of Washington State University that fall focused on the Latin American novel and some of Vargas Llosa’s own work. His first lecture was an introductory overview to the Latin American novel in the twentieth century, a markedly critical and lightly humorous series of remarks about classic authors of the 1920s and 1930s—Rómulo Gallegos, José Eustacio Rivera, Ricardo Guiraldes, and the like. This lecture was only one of the numerous critiques the writers of the Boom directed toward their predecessors. Some scholars have considered Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez to have been excessively critical of this Latin American literary tradition, which García Márquez once called a “fraud” and both Fuentes and Vargas Llosa labeled as “primitive.” As committed literary modernists, however, they did feel an understandable need to distinguish themselves from all their predecessors, who were still writing strictly within the limits of what was fundamentally a nineteenth-century realist-naturalist tradition until the 1940s.

Vargas Llosa’s lectures at Washington State were in English; the second one was an early version, in English, of what eventually became his long essay (or short book) titled Historia secreta de una novela (1971, Secret History of a Novel). This is a personal and provocative narrative about how the novel La casa verde came into being. The successes of this lecture and its subsequent publication were multiple; it is one of the primary examples of how Vargas Llosa and the other writers of the Boom not only wrote fiction that was innovative and engaging in the 1960s, but also published essays and interviews that, in effect, created a readership and sometimes even suggested new ways of reading this fiction. Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (1963, Hopscotch), Fuentes’s essay La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969, The new Spanish American novel), and Vargas Llosa’s Historia secreta de una novela are among the best examples of this type of critical work.

In the late 1960s, after finishing his residency at Washington State University, and as he assumed other teaching positions, Vargas Llosa was seriously considering the possibility of pursuing an academic career as a way of ensuring his economic security. He was understandably unsure about the viability of a professional career based strictly on writing, for there were no precedents in Peru: no Peruvian writer had successfully made a full-time professional career based exclusively on writing novels and essays. Vargas Llosa taught at the University of Puerto Rico in early 1969 while still considering both options: life as a novelist who occasionally teaches and life as an academic who writes novels and essays on weekends. He pursued both projects while at the University of Puerto Rico. On the one hand, he began the actual writing of his book on García Márquez, which he planned to present as a doctoral dissertation, giving him the PhD degree he would need to assume a regular, full-time academic position. On the other, he completed his third full-length novel, Conversación en La Catedral, in early 1969. As he weighed both possibilities, the advice of his literary agent in Barcelona, Carmen Balcells, was important: she argued forcefully that Mario Vargas Llosa could indeed make writing novels a full-time professional career. His teaching positions during this decision-making period were at the University of Puerto Rico in 1969 and King’s College in London in 1970. In the end, after the most definitive of his several decisions in favor of pursing his chosen career as a professional, full-time writer, he moved from London (and access to British universities) to Barcelona, with the idea of completing two books: his study of García Márquez’s fiction and the next novel, Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service). He made this move to Barcelona after the appearance of Conversación en La Catedral.

Conversación en La Catedral is Vargas Llosa’s lengthiest novel and the most elaborate of his modernist texts. His only other novel of such epic proportions was to be the later La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, The War of the End of the World). Vargas Llosa was a novelist who had launched his career with the intention of modernizing the Peruvian and Latin American novel; Conversación en La Catedral was the culmination of that plan. This was also Vargas Llosa’s most explicitly political project, focusing as it does on the Odría dictatorship in Peru.

In some ways comparable to García Márquez’s Cien años de sole-dad and Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Conversación en La Catedral is one of those “total” novels about which the writers of the Boom spoke in the 1960s. Indeed, Fuentes, in La nueva novela hispanoamericana, and Vargas Llosa, in his book on García Márquez, extol the virtues of exploring the possibilities of the totalizing impulse and the “total” novel (see my epilogue). This third novel, then, is Vargas Llosa’s attempt to fictionalize the totality of Peruvian social and political history in the 1950s. The intensification and elaboration of elements found in the first two novels also reveal the roots of the totalizing impulse so evident in this novel.

As in the two previous novels, Conversación en La Catedral has a strong plot that in itself is an important element. The structure, however, marks a change: it is the author’s first novel without a systematic division of narrative segments within all the chapters. Vargas Llosa originally planned to publish it as a four-part book in four separate volumes. No edition was published in this manner, but the first edition in Spanish did consist of two separate volumes. Later editions in Spanish, and the English version, have been printed in one volume.

Each of the four parts of Conversación en La Catedral is composed of between four and ten chapters. Part I (190 pages) consists of ten numbered chapters with no formal division within any of them. Part II (134  pages) has nine numbered chapters, each of which is formally divided into eight to twelve unnumbered, brief narrative segments, which range in length from one to three pages. Part III (133 pages) consists of four numbered chapters which, like part I, have no formal divisions. Part IV (134 total pages) has eight numbered chapters which, like Part II, have unnumbered narrative segments. Each chapter has either three or four of these narrative segments, which range in length from three to seven pages.

Part I relates the early years of the Odría regime, beginning approximately in 1948. Odría himself does not appear directly in part I (nor anywhere else in the novel). The two main characters portrayed in part I are Santiago Zavala and Cayo Bermúdez. Santiago is the son of Fermín Zavala, an affluent businessman belonging to Peru’s powerful oligarchy. Cayo Bermúdez is the director of security for Odría’s government. Part I encompasses Santiago’s years as a student at the University of San Marcos and Don Cayo’s rise from anonymity to a position of supreme power in the Peruvian government.

The novel actually begins in the “present” of the 1960s. The now-thirty-two-year-old Santiago Zavala encounters Ambrosio Pardo, former chauffeur for Santiago’s father, Fermín, and also for Cayo Bermúdez. Ambrosio works at a dog pound, where Santiago goes to claim his missing dog. The two spend four hours in intense dialogue at a bar called The Cathedral. Their dialogue, in turn, is transmuted into other dialogues and anecdotes, which in their totality relate the story of their respective lives and those of many other individuals during the period from about 1948 to the early 1960s.

Santiago’s story begins with his conflicts within his family. Unlike his brother, Sparky, and his sister, Teté, he is unwilling to accept the social values of his oligarchical family or the policies it supports. Against the wishes of his family, Santiago insists upon study at San Marcos, a university open to working-class students and, as viewed by the oligarchy, associated with leftist politics. Santiago does become involved in politics with a group of students. He and Jacobo vie for the attention of Aída. Betrayed by Jacobo, Santiago loses Aída to him. Santiago continues his readings of Marxist texts and, reviewing that period in retrospect, observes that he used to envy people who had a blind faith in something. At the end of part I, Santiago is arrested as a consequence of his political activities. He decides, then, to leave his family’s home and live independently—quitting school to work at La Crónica.

Cayo Bermúdez’s story begins in the third chapter of part I. His ex-classmate, General Espina, brings him from a town in the provinces, Chincha, to become the Peruvian director of security in 1948. Don Cayo’s rise to power—from his previous role as an obscure local businessman in Chincha—is spectacular and horrifying. He soon becomes Odría’s “other self,” as he is described in the text. His basic method, as recounted in the seventh chapter, is to acquire power by overstepping and neutralizing everyone in the government except Odría himself. Don Cayo’s story blends directly with Santiago’s for the first time at the end of part I. When Santiago is arrested for his political activity, he is in the hands of Don Cayo.

Many other characters, some of whom grow in importance later in the novel, appear in part I. Ambrosio is present as Don Cayo’s chauffeur. A chapter featuring the characters Amalia and Trinidad provides a working-class point of view on the political events of the period. The reader observes Fermín not only as Santiago’s father but also as one of Don Cayo’s collaborators from the business sector.

People, places, and events that initially seem to be unrelated appear in part I. The reader does not find a broad clarification of all the details, but rather has the aesthetic pleasure of participating in the unfolding of a pattern. The initial signal to the reader that this is a book of patterns (as an accomplished modernist novel), rather than incoherent fragmentation, can be found early in the first chapter: Santiago mentions his newspaper campaign against rabies, and later in the same chapter he meets Ambrosio, who has found employment at a dog pound precisely because of the newspaper campaign. It is a coincidence that provides the reader with an initial assurance that this is a novel in which happenings will eventually fit together. Nevertheless, part I does project some unanswerable questions. Brief dialogues with Fermín speaking appear in the text inexplicably. These dialogues involving Fermín (and Ambrosio) will appear throughout the novel, but cannot be fully understood until part IV, when it is revealed that Ambrosio has, surreptitiously, been Fermín’s homosexual partner; the secret dialogues have been between them. Similarly, there is an ongoing dialogue between Santiago and Carlos throughout the eighth chapter of part I for which the reader will have no context until later in the novel. In both cases, these are the “telescoped dialogues” initially explored in Madame Bovary, La ciudad y los perros, and La casa verde.

Part II places more emphasis on Don Cayo and Ambrosio. Don Cayo now has absolute power in the Odría government. His men—Ambrosio, Ludovico, Hipólito, and others—carry out this systematic manipulation of the political scene: they organize political rallies that give the appearance of mass support for Odría; they repress and terrify the government’s opposition parties; they respond to all of Don Cayo’s personal and political whims. Don Cayo’s private wishes involve sexual perversity; he takes voyeuristic pleasure in watching lesbian activities. Ambrosio, too, appears in the context of a love affair with his girlfriend and wife-to-be, Amalia.

Santiago, now working at La Crónica and isolated from his family, meets occasionally with his uncle Clodomiro. His brother, Sparky, eventually contacts him, too. A strike that takes place at the end of part II appears to mark the end of Odría’s regime. Don Cayo is rumored to have escaped to Brazil.

Part III features the most frenetic activity of the novel. The first chapter begins with melodrama: Santiago and his colleagues at La Crónica go to the scene of Hortensia’s death to investigate the story of her being knifed. Don Cayo’s loss of power develops concurrently with the downfall of the house of prostitution he had supported in the neighborhood of San Miguel. Chaos in both the narration and the story ensue in the last chapter, the fourth. Don Cayo sends Ludovico and a gang of thugs to the city of Arequipa to interrupt an anti-government rally there. A plethora of telescoped dialogues, some by telephone, relate the story of the gang’s sound defeat: some die and others barely escape alive. Don Cayo and his government have lost in their final attempt to control Peru.

Part IV further develops certain personal relationships and bestows upon the reader long-awaited revelations. Santiago scandalizes his parents by marrying Ana, a girl of far too humble origins for the social stature of the Zavala family in a nation as hierarchical as Peru. He also repudiates the family one last time by refusing to discuss the inheritance after Fermín’s death. Ambrosio marries Amalia and they move to Pucallpa, where he attempts, unsuccessfully, to operate a business with a friend. Throughout part IV there is an ongoing dialogue between Ambrosio and the prostitute whose services he uses, Queta. It is in conversations with her that Fermín’s homosexual relationship with Ambrosio is revealed. Fermín had abused him sexually during visits to Ancón. The novel ends, as it had begun, in the “present” of the dialogue between Santiago and Ambrosio in The Cathedral.

Almost all the pieces of a narrative puzzle—as the ideal modernist text—have fallen together by the conclusion of the novel: the work is very much a whole, with a sense of closure. In the end, the reader gets to know the truth about many of the details related to the plot, but Vargas Llosa, as always, leaves numerous ambiguities. The reader is offered many possible truths in the novel, but most are relative: truth, like empirical reality, is amorphous and is only a matter of circumstance and situation. As the circumstances and situations change, so does an established sense of truth and reality. The reader never apprehends the full truth, for example, behind the death of Hortensia. It would also be a difficult proposition for the reader to answer Santiago’s persistent question, posed from the novel’s first page: at what precise moment had Peru “fucked itself up”? This has as its corollary question: “at what precise moment did Santiago fuck himself up?” Other questions and ambiguities remain concerning the characters’ motives and the nature of Peru.

Metaphorically speaking, all of the anecdotes within the novel emanate from the original four-hour conversation between Santiago and Ambrosio at The Cathedral. The conversation leads to multiple associations and other dialogues in the past. Such a generalization can only be metaphorical and not literal, however, since much of what supposedly emanates from the Santiago-Ambrosio dialogue could never have been known by either of them. In technical terms, there are three sources of information, or three authoritative narrators: Santiago, Ambrosio, and the omniscient narrator outside the story.

Jean Franco has made comparisons between Conversación en La Catedral and Camus’s The Fall.39 She notes that Vargas Llosa’s novel can also be compared to Sartre’s The Reprieve: as in The Reprieve, there are moments when the “characters” are named but then dissolve back into the chorus of the text so that their discourse is identifiable only when new information becomes available to the reader. Her comparison between Conversación en La Catedral and The Fall is based on the parallel between the “confession” made by Clamance in a “church”—the Mexico City Bar in Amsterdam—and the “confession” that Santiago makes to Ambrosio in their “church,” “The Cathedral” bar in Lima. This analysis leads to Franco’s insightful observation about the conversation between Santiago and Ambrosio: what takes place in Conversación en La Catedral is not a true dialogue between the journalist Santiago and the ex-chauffeur Ambrosio, but rather separate recollections that take the form of dismembered dialogues with other people in the past. Franco concludes that Vargas Llosa, like Sartre and Camus, focuses the reader’s attention beyond the creation of individual characters. Paradoxically, each of these three writers emphasizes the role of the individual in society, yet each creates literary projections of the individual that verge on impersonality.

Seen in the context of Faulkner, Conversación en La Catedral offers noteworthy comparisons as well, particularly with the novel Sanctuary. Mary Davis has compared Vargas Llosa’s Cayo Bermúdez to Faulkner’s Popeye.40 Davis observes that Vargas Llosa amplifies Faulkner’s method of characterization: whereas in Sanctuary Popeye’s relationship with other characters is by means of objects, that of Cayo Bermúdez is by means of intermediary characters. Vargas Llosa also creates an atmosphere similar to Faulkner’s. In addition, Conversación en La Catedral and Light in August have comparable plot development: Faulkner never clearly reveals that Joe Christmas killed Joanna Burden, and Vargas Llosa leaves the death of Hortensia (“the Muse”) ambiguous.

With Conversación en La Catedral, Vargas Llosa goes not only well beyond Flaubert in his use of telescoped dialogues, but also far beyond the telescoped dialogues in his own previous novel, La casa verde. The type of dialogue pioneered in Madame Bovary and La ciudad y los perros, and then fully developed in La casa verde, is more fully exploited in Conversación en La Catedral. In La casa verde, Vargas Llosa frequently intercalates two dialogues that belong to different temporal and spatial spheres; at a maximum level of complexity he creates telescoped dialogues with as many as three different conversations in juxtaposition. Conversación en La Catedral, however, showcases as many as eighteen dialogues operating simultaneously (part III, chapter 4). This intense chapter, relating a political revolt in Arequipa, contains juxtaposed dialogues taking place in different parts of Peru. The physical action of the chapter takes place in Arequipa, but most of the dialogues take place in Lima and other places outside of Arequipa.

Vargas Llosa achieves several effects by his use of telescoped dialogues and similar techniques. The intricate set of eighteen dialogues dealing with the Arequipa incident offers a simultaneous insider’s and outsider’s view of the events at hand. Characters like Ludovico and Ambrosio are the insiders, and are able to tell the story as participants; the dialogues with Don Cayo, Fermín, and others communicate how the event was perceived from the outside—in addition to the role they had as distant participants from Lima. The juxtaposition of dialogues affords the reader the opportunity to observe and judge the contradictions and paradoxes of different situations.

.   .   .

Now settled into Barcelona after the publication of Conversación en La Catedral, Vargas Llosa recommitted himself to his lifetime goal: to be a writer as a full-time profession. He and Patricia lived in Barcelona as their primary residence from 1970 to 1974, the year their third child, Morgana, was born. The writer’s work in Barcelona was to complete two books: García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio and Pantaleón y las visitadoras. The Vargas Llosa family lived in the Sarrià neighborhood of Barcelona, two blocks from García Márquez, his wife Mercedes, and their young children. These were the “soft” years of the Franco dictatorship (the dictablanda), years in which Latin American writers still lived amid the glory of the Boom and with a certain optimism about the potential role of culture in society at large: they had the conviction that literature was transforming the world.41

In 1970 and 1971 in Barcelona, the writers of the Boom seemed to enjoy a relatively close friendship, and these were positive years for Vargas Llosa’s still-good relationship with all of them. There are entertaining anecdotes, for example, about their friendships, such as the Christmas Eve of 1971 when Vargas Llosa and Cortázar borrowed the children’s gifts out of their boxes and used the small remote-control electric toy cars to compete against each other in a race.

Seen in retrospect, the phenomenon of the Boom (approximately 1962–1972) always involved a certain tension between, on the one hand, some literary and political commonalities that often brought these writers together and, on the other, political differences that created distances. The factors that brought them together (or at least created an aura of unity) were the Catalonian publishing house Seix Barral, the Cuban Revolution, the organs Marcha in Montevideo and Mundo Nuevo in Paris, the critical work of Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Ángel Rama, the Catalonian literary agent Carmen Balcells, and the North American translator Gregory Rabassa. The presence of these individuals and entities made the 1960s Boom of the Latin American novel, as we know it, possible. During the entire decade of the Boom, nevertheless, there were political differences that created ongoing problems, some of which became untenable by the early 1970s. In the most informed insider’s view of the Boom, José Donoso’s Historia personal del “Boom” (Personal history of the “Boom”), it is evident, for example, that Donoso himself was relatively indifferent to politics when he and Fuentes participated in a conference in Concepción, Chile, in 1962. According to Donoso, Fuentes took the initiative in politicizing this otherwise “literary” conference, and it was Fuentes who, in effect, politicized Donoso.

Indeed, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez, given their intellectual backgrounds and life experience with authoritarian power in their own respective nations in the 1950s, were in the vanguard, as enthusiastic supporters of many leftist political causes in the early 1960s, including their enthusiastic support of the Cuban Revolution. Donoso and Cortázar were relatively indifferent to politics in the early 1960s, and were friends and allies with Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez at the outset, primarily out of a common literary interest: the deep-seated commitment all five writers (as well as Alejo Carpentier, Salvador Garmendia, and a host of others) had to modernizing what they considered an embarrassingly backward, anachronistic, and provincial literary tradition in Latin America.

Vargas Llosa himself had two widely known passions in the early 1960s: Flaubert and the Cuban Revolution. In the nascent period of the Boom, it was their enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution that Fuentes and Vargas Llosa shared, the unprecedented commercial success of La ciudad y los perros in its Spanish edition, and then the publication of Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962, The Death of Artemio Cruz), and Cortázar’s Rayuela that provided the initial impetus for the Boom.

By the mid-1960s, however, Vargas Llosa had a growing number of doubts about the direction of Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba, particularly in the areas of human rights and freedom of expression. The most public of these concerns surfaced in the form of his public letter to Cuban official Haydée Santamaría.

During the Barcelona period in the early 1970s, then, the personal, political, and literary relations among these five writers (Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Cortázar, García Márquez, and Donoso), as well as the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, were friendly on the surface, but in reality complex and often strained. Although they were interested in principle in a joint project to publish a literary, cultural, and political magazine in the early 1970s—for which Goytisolo might have served as editor—this project only served to aggravate the differences among these public intellectuals. The last time that all five of them were together in the same social space was in 1970 in southern France, in Avignon, for the opening night of Fuentes’s play El tuerto es rey as part of a theater festival.

The more public affair that created unresolved differences among the writers of the Boom involved the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. Censored and eventually jailed for writing poetry that the Cuban government deemed anti-revolutionary, Padilla became a cause célèbre for those intellectuals, including Vargas Llosa and Fuentes, who prized the defense of human rights over the need to support the Cuban Revolution. García Márquez and Cortázar, however, disagreed with Vargas Llosa and Fuentes, and remained fully committed to supporting Castro’s government.

The Vargas Llosa of the 1970s who began distancing himself from some of his most cherished causes of the 1960s also began to distance himself from his known models of novelizing. Most evident in this respect was his temporary rejection of the impulse for that lengthy and dense “total” novel that had driven, increasingly, each of his novelistic plans in the 1960s. His two novels of the 1970s, Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor were generally shorter and less demanding than his previous novels. Read in isolation, these two novels are hardly recognizable as words written by an author who held Flaubert and Faulkner as his ideal models. The melodramatic aspects of life initially explored in the second half of Conversación en La Catedral are fully exploited in these two later novels, and exaggerated to humorous proportions. Scholars and general readers who are either unable or unwilling to distinguish between seriousness and sobriety might well be unsatisfied with these serious but unsober novels.

The source of the humor in these two novels of the 1970s is situational: Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the author’s raucous satire of one of the most consistent targets of criticism, the military; the comic humor of La tía Julia y el escribidor arises from a variety of sources but above all from his use of melodramatic radio soap operas and self-parody. These two novels (along with three other novels published much later in his career, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? [1986, Who Killed Palomino Molero?], Elogio de la madrasta [1988, In Praise of the Stepmother], and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto [1997, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto]) are his first of five “entertainments.”42

In retrospect, Vargas Llosa’s turn toward humor was not without precedents. The melodramatic situations in Conversación en La Catedral, such as Amalia’s love life and Santiago Zavala’s marriage, would bring a smile were it not for the dismal context within which they are played out. The incongruities that permeate all of Vargas Llosa’s novels are even more prominent in the two novels of the 1970s and are the basis for much of their humor. The juxtaposition of the characters’ blatantly contradictory statements, achieved by the telescoping of dialogues in the early novels, creates paradoxes with humorous potential. In Conversación en La Catedral Santiago Zavala explains his college days to Ambrosio: “Revolutions, books, museums. Do you see what it is to be pure?” The uneducated Ambrosio responds: “I thought being pure was living without fucking, son.”43 Such an exchange reveals a writer with an eye for the incongruities that are the stuff of humor.

When Pantaleón y las visitadoras appeared in Spanish in 1973, it was part of a general trend in Latin American fiction toward an accessibility that had not characterized many of the major novels of the 1960s, including Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. The idea of a “total novel” had produced such landmark works as García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en La Catedral, and José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970, The Obscene Bird of the Night). Although accessibility was obviously not an important issue for many eminent Latin American novelists in the late 1960s, by the early 1970s a general reaction had set in against these hermetic tomes. Vargas Llosa himself, years later, admits that he became more interested in his readers after writing his first three novels (see Vargas Llosa’s explanation in my epilogue).

One example of this more accessible fiction in Latin America was a series of entertaining fantasies that García Márquez published in 1972: La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Story of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother). The young Mexican novelist Gustavo Sainz, whose previous books had been limited to a primarily intellectual reading public, published a humorous bestseller in 1974: La princesa del Palacio de Hierro. Writers of the then-designated “Postboom,” such as Antonio Skármeta and Luisa Valenzuela, were disinterested in technical experimentation.⁴⁴ It was within this general context—a period during which a large contingent of self-assured and well-established authors began to write a more accessible fiction—frequently in the humorous vein of Pantaleón y las visitadoras—that this novel appeared.

Set in Iquitos, the Peruvian Amazon jungle, Pantaleón y las visitadoras tells the story of a military officer par excellence, Captain Pantaleón Pantoja. His superiors send him to the jungle to solve a problem that had proven embarrassing for the government: the soldiers posted in these remote areas had been molesting the local young women with alarming frequency and gravity. Pantoja receives orders to go to Iquitos as an undercover officer and organize regular institutional sexual activity for the soldiers. His astonishing success at this enterprise, in addition to other local factors beyond his control, eventually causes his downfall. Both his methodical approach to the task and the bizarre anecdotes that accompany this central story—such as the presence of a fanatical religious cult—make the story often hilarious.

The first chapter, written entirely in dialogue, introduces Pantoja’s organizational work by showing him receiving his assignment and underlining his ability as an organizer. Others characterize him as an “innate organizer” with a “mathematical sense of order, executive capacity,” and an “organizing brain.” The midpoint and end chapters are exclusively dialogue, as is the first, whereas the remaining chapters portray Pantoja’s organizing by means of military documents, messages, letters, newspaper articles, and conversations. These communications appear in addition to short passages related by an omniscient narrator. In the second chapter Pantoja himself describes the intimate details of his organization via official communiqués, all supported by data in scientific experiments. By the third chapter, Pantoja’s mania for organization reaches such extremes that he relies on a stopwatch to calculate precisely his own sexual performance with his wife. Approximately halfway through the novel, Pantoja’s failure is precipitated by his success as organizer, for his operation has acquired its own dynamics, over which the military fears it has lost control.

A turning point in Pantoja’s enterprise is a public denunciation by a local radio commentator named Sinchi. On his special program, “The Voice of Sinchi,” the radio announcer asks rhetorically how long the citizens of Loreto are going to continue tolerating the “shameful spectacle” which is the existence of the “Special Service.” He denounces the captain as unlawful and unprincipled. Sinchi encourages one of Pantoja’s exemployees, a prostitute named Maclovia, to tell her story on the air. As expected, Pantoja’s success as an organizer causes his doom: he loses his position in the jungle and is assigned to a remote and undesirable provincial town. (Pantoja is basically the failed Lituma figure of other Vargas Llosa novels.)

Several of Vargas Llosa’s recurrent themes and preoccupations (the military, for example) and oft-used techniques (such as telescoped dialogues) are present in Pantaleón y las visitadoras. But the complete change in tone and new narrative techniques of this novel underscore the author’s versatility. In addition to being an entertainment, this novel is, like the previous work, subversively critical of the society that it describes.

Vargas Llosa articulates social commentary by devices through which the incongruities in the process of organizing are observed. He consistently juxtaposes sexual proclivity with the military repression of such impulses. The point of departure for such juxtaposition occurs in the initial conversation between Pantoja and his wife, Pocha, in the first paragraph. In this playful conversation, in which she calls him “Captain Pantoja” but then “honey” and “my little lieutenant,” the initial confluence of the personal intimate life and the military code appears. A similar technique, and effect, can be observed in the first communiqué sent by Pantoja. His mathematical calculations of the length of time involved in the sexual act and the number of monthly sex acts necessary to enable the soldiers to perform their military functions at their best are a similar humorous juxtaposition of the military and the intimate. Once the operation becomes a quasi-official part of the military superstructure, the effect of the juxtaposition loses its humor.

Incongruities become apparent through the emphasis placed on the values and mentality of the military. An important example of this emphasis is a statement by Pantoja at the beginning of the novel, when, upon receiving his order to organize as a civilian, he is told by General Scavino to always “think as an officer.”45 His actions, and those of his colleagues, should be understood precisely as such: the manifestation of a military mentality. Another significant aspect of the values apparent in the novel is its exaltation of machismo. The focal point of the anecdote is the degrading and mechanized sexual practices that Pantoja institutionalizes. The point of departure for such mechanization is Pantoja’s initial scientific investigation. The operation is conceived to provide for maximum “efficiency.”

Although surely a less demanding reading experience than Vargas Llosa’s previous novels, Pantaleón y las visitadoras exemplifies the precise control of narration that is a consistent mark of his work. Consideration of Pantoja’s organization (the content) and of Vargas Llosa’s organization (the structure) reveals a novel that is a parody of military organization in both form and content. This correspondence between content and form, theme and technique, results in an aesthetic experience for the reader and implies a critical function of the work with regard to Peruvian society.

Fanatic attitudes lend themselves to humor, and Vargas Llosa adroitly exploits the comic potential of obsessive characters in this novel. He has consistently shown a certain fascination with fanatics, such as Father García in La casa verde and Cayo Bermúdez in Conversación en La Catedral, but Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the first novel that features a humorous portrayal of a fanatic who is a major character.

THE MATURE WRITER (1975–1991)

In the period from 1975 to 1991 Mario Vargas Llosa was a high-profile public intellectual throughout the Hispanic world, and was often called upon in public dialogues and academic conferences throughout the world. These were the celebrity years of the mature novelist, who remained highly productive, publishing an ongoing set of essays and six novels during this period. The novelistic centerpiece of these years was the epic work La guerra del fin del mundo; his other novels were Historia de Mayta, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, El hablador, and Elogio de la madrastra. This was also the period of Vargas Llosa’s most direct intervention in Peruvian politics: he was a candidate for the presidency of Peru, losing the election in the final round to Alberto Fujimori.

In mid-1974 the Vargas Llosa family moved to Lima, which was their principal residence during the 1974–1991 period, although they frequently traveled to London, and Mario accepted invitations for lectures on several continents. He spent the year 1980 in Washington, DC, a key year for his future political thought, because of the birth of his interest in free-market economies and classic liberal political thought. Each of his early novels had received a recognition or award; in this period of the 1970s and 1980s, he received numerous awards in the Hispanic world and Europe.46 Beginning in the 1980s, his name occasionally appeared on unofficial but well-informed short lists for the Nobel Prize for Literature, although the recipients of this prize who wrote in Spanish were instead the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican Octavio Paz, and the Spaniard Camilo José Cela. He was also honored by a growing number of colleges and universities, who invited him to conferences organized in his honor; World Literature Today of the University of Oklahoma invited him to one of their celebrated international conferences (as they had for several writers prior to their receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as for Julio Cortázar), and the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana invited him to Madrid in 1984.

His arrival in Lima in 1974 marked the first time he had taken permanent residence in Peru since 1958. All of his fiction, with the exception of his early stories, had been written abroad, and Vargas Llosa had occasionally mentioned the advantages of maintaining a distance from Peru in order to deal with his traumas, obsessions, and “demons” (demonios). Accordingly, before returning to Lima, he completed a lengthy essay in Mallorca, which appeared in 1975 under the title La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary. The first part of this book was a narrative about his personal relationship with Madame Bovary; the second part is an academic study of this novel. This was his second book-length expression of his ideas about the writer’s “demons,” his personal literary preferences, and related items very particular to Vargas Llosa’s own special way of reading as a writer.47

Between 1975 and 1991 Vargas Llosa was constantly traveling, and in 1975 he spent a few weeks in the Dominican Republic to co-direct, with José María Gutiérrez, the film version of Pantaleón y las visitadoras. This film was not a great success, but his stay in the Caribbean was the origin of a later novel on a former dictator of the Dominican Republic, La fiesta del Chivo (2000, The Feast of the Goat). Vargas Llosa was elected president of the Pen Club International in 1976, a position that gave him the opportunity to actively pursue one of his lifetime concerns: the defense of freedom of the press, human rights, and writers imprisoned throughout the world. His travels this year included a stay of several months in Israel, where he delivered lectures at the University of Jerusalem. It was in 1977, the year he assumed the position of Simón Bolívar Chair at Cambridge University, that he surprised his reading public with another light and humorous novel, the second of his six entertainments, under the title La tía Julia y el escribidor.

The fanatic character in this novel is a writer, Pedro Camacho, one of the most unforgettable creations in a body of work replete with fanatic and unforgettable characters. Camacho is the prolific author of soap operas that are broadcast on the radio—an author who takes himself more seriously than a Balzac or a Sartre. (The reader is invited to imagine parallels with the writers of the Boom, all of whom cited Balzac and Sartre in the 1960s.) The principal source of entertainment for us is Camacho. The protagonist, however, is not this Balzacian fabricator of home entertainment but a young, aspiring writer quite similar to Mario Vargas Llosa—and some of the other writers of the Boom. The protagonist, in fact, is modeled after his creator, and is even named “Marito.”

Both Pedro Camacho and Marito relate directly to Vargas Llosa’s life. In the early 1950s Vargas Llosa was in charge of news bulletins for Radio Panamericana in Lima. He had contact with a Bolivian attached to a neighboring station, Radio Central, also owned by the backers of Radio Panamericana. This Bolivian was, according to Vargas Llosa, quite a colorful person and was responsible for all the scripts in the soap operas that headlined Radio Central’s programming. This diligent “writer” was enormously popular in Lima. Vargas Llosa claims that he was both amused and fascinated by the Bolivian scriptwriter, whom he found to be a truly picturesque character: he worked tirelessly, he had an extraordinary sense of professional responsibility, and he was very absorbed by his role as a writer and performer.48 It was back during this very period that Vargas Llosa was becoming involved with writing for the first time himself. He also fell in love with an aunt much his senior—as mentioned earlier—against his parents’ wishes. All of this—the self-styled Peruvian Balzac and Vargas Llosa’s tumultuous first romance—provides ample anecdotal material for melodrama. His semi-autobiographical recounting of his relationship with his Aunt Julia resulted in her publishing her own book in response.⁴⁹ The novel’s wildest anecdotes, however, are the product of Vargas Llosa’s imagination.

La tía Julia y el escribidor is a novel of one love story and numerous soap opera melodramas of intrigue, passion, violence, and similar material. The odd-numbered chapters tell the story of Marito: his apprenticeship as a writer and growing romance with his aunt. The even-numbered chapters are nine radio soap operas that appear in the text supposedly as Pedro Camacho has written them for broadcast. Vargas Llosa has explained his original plan for this novel as follows: he would narrate accurately some episodes from his own life, covering several months—the time during which he worked for Radio Panamericana, how he met his first wife, his marriage—and all that the whole thing meant in his personal experience; to alternate between these two stories was a little like presenting the front and back of reality, an objective part and a subjective part, a real face and a made-up one; he tried to do this in the novel, to alternate a chapter totally or almost totally imagined, with a chapter of personal history, authentic, documented. This is a description of the basic structure of the novel, even though, as Vargas Llosa admitted, the final version is quite different from what he had originally planned.

The odd-numbered chapters are from the point of view of a first-person narrator in retrospect. An adult tells his own story of late adolescence. At the beginning, “Marito” is studying law at the University of San Marcos, working at Radio Panamericana, and, above all, aspiring to be a writer. In the first chapter he (along with his family) meets the teasing Aunt Julia and the pompous scriptwriter at the radio station, who succinctly introduces himself as “Pedro Camacho: a Bolivian and an artist: a friend.”⁵⁰

The initial chapters provide an introductory characterization of each. The indefatigable Camacho appears as a caricature of a writer whose superficial production never discourages his utter seriousness of purpose. Social events with the family lead to Marito’s relationship with Julia: they celebrate an uncle’s birthday by going out to drink and dance, and on the way home Marito kisses her for the first time. At this stage in Marito’s development as a writer, literary creation is conceived mostly in terms of models. He is always planning on writing “in the manner of” renowned authors (Somerset Maugham, Maupassant, and others). As the odd-numbered chapters are developed, Camacho’s popularity grows in Lima, Marito experiments with different approaches to writing, and the secret love affair with Aunt Julia becomes more intense. Camacho loses control of his soap-opera factory, confusing characters among his numerous weekly productions. He eventually becomes insane and is hurried off to an asylum—only to appear at the very end of the novel as a listless and even more eccentric old man. Marito’s affair with Aunt Julia leads to their scandalous elopement to a small town.

The even-numbered chapters of La tía Julia y el escribidor offer nine soap operas, written by Camacho, in which the most humorous element is their aesthetic failure. They are poorly written and usually in poor taste. The first of these stories (chapter 2) portrays a young woman, Elianita, who is to wed Red Antúnez. The evening they make nuptial vows, it becomes apparent that Elianita is four months pregnant—by Red’s brother, Richard. The melodrama ends with a series of melodramatic questions, such as “Would Red Antúnez desert his reckless, foolhardy spouse that very night?” (Aunt Julia, 39). All of Camacho’s soap operas tell such a story and end with similar melodramatic interrogations. They often feature characters, ranging from rapists to psychopathic murderers, who manifest sexual or psychological aberrations.

The structure of alternating chapters gives a special ending to the novel. By chapters 17 and 19, Marito’s situation has become critical. Chapter 20, which the reader expects to be another of Camacho’s soap operas, is the final chapter of the affair Marito has had with his lover, Aunt Julia, and with his love, writing. In this manner, Vargas Llosa implies that Marito’s story has become just another soap opera. Despite the numerous suggestions along these lines, fundamental differences remain between Marito’s story and those of Camacho.

La tía Julia y el escribidor begins with an epigraph from a novel by the Mexican novelist Salvador Elizondo: “I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing.” (Elizondo’s solipsistic observations continue for several more lines.) Such commentary reflects a common attitude of writers during the 1970s, both in Latin America and elsewhere. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter can be seen as part of a general trend toward a postmodern, self-conscious type fiction or, to use a term that the North American writer in vogue at the time popularized, a literature of exhaustion. This is Vargas Llosa’s novel about writing. Never the less, it has features that distinguish it from much metafiction. The dynamics of reading and writing in this novel make it more entertaining than much self-conscious fiction, which is often characterized as dry “writers’ writing.”51

La tía Julia y el escribidor is, in effect, ten stories: nine soap operas plus Marito’s story. This interest in storytelling is consistent with Vargas Llosa’s previous work and sets it apart from much of the “writing about writing” published in Latin America and elsewhere during the 1970s. Vargas Llosa’s humorous inventions of this decade set the stage for the movement toward a more traditional writing in his later work of the 1980s.

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Vargas Llosa dedicated most of his time in the late 1970s to the research and reading necessary for his ambitious novel La guerra del fin del mundo. According to Vargas Llosa, this adventure novel in the style of Dumas had been “latent” in him since he began writing.⁵² He began the novel in 1977, immediately after completing La tía Julia y el escribidor. He traveled to Japan to give a lecture in April 1979, but after that trip his daily work was the manuscript for La guerra del fin del mundo.

In July of that year, after two years of working on this novel, he traveled to Bahia, Brazil, to research information related to the religious fanatics in Canudos, in the northeastern region of Brazil, at the end of the nineteenth century. Before going to Brazil, he had read several accounts of an uprising in Canudos, readings that he took on with a “passionate” interest.⁵³ This trip to northeastern Brazil proved to be quite valuable: before it he had been writing insecurely for two years, but this experience was both revealing and quite important, as will be discussed at length below.⁵⁴

He found other materials for La guerra del fin del mundo in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where he spent a year researching and writing in the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institute. For his intellectual and political career overall, this period proved to be important not only for the progress he made on his epic novel (which he completed at the Wilson Center), but also for his political vision. At the Wilson Center, Vargas Llosa was in regular dialogue with the other fellows, each of whom researched and wrote according to their individual needs and schedules. Vargas Llosa had his office in the original old pink building of the Smithsonian; the staff brought the books to the researchers according to their requests, and the fellows had lunch together daily, sharing their research projects with their cohorts once a week.

During this year Vargas Llosa discovered a key reading for his future political vision: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. It was in this book that Vargas Llosa found the seeds for much of his liberal thinking of the 1980s and beyond. As far as his economic ideas are concerned, other authors that he began reading in the Wilson Center were Isaiah Berlin and Milton Friedman. From these texts Vargas Llosa began forging new political and economic ideas, distant from the Marxist and neo-Marxist concepts that had been so important for him and his generation of Latin American intellectuals. This was the beginning of his transformation into what some of his critics have identified as a “neo liberal,” but Vargas Llosa has consistently insisted that he does not identify himself as a “neoliberal” but rather a classic liberal of the nineteenth-century tradition (see the epilogue). For Vargas Llosa, his stay at the Wilson Center was a period in which he concluded that economics was not really a science.

Vargas Llosa considered the 1980–1981 academic year a good one. He and Patricia lived in a picturesque wooden home on Reservoir Road in the Georgetown section of Washington; from there, Mario could walk in the morning to the Smithsonian—an activity he had enjoyed since the days of his walks to the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in the 1950s. In September 1980 José Miguel Oviedo invited Vargas Llosa to a symposium at Indiana University in which the Peruvian gave one of the three plenary lectures, along with Carlos Fuentes and Juan Goytisolo.

After the stay in Washington, Vargas Llosa returned to Lima, where he directed a television program on cultural subjects, La Torre de Babel (The Tower of Babel Tower). He also published a play and saw it open in Lima and Buenos Aires under the title La señorita de Tacna (The missus from Tacna). The major event in the life of Vargas Llosa in 1981, however, was the publication of La guerra del fin del mundo.

Its epic vision, storytelling genius, and fascinating characters are just three of several factors that make La guerra del fin del mundo the embodiment of Vargas Llosa’s twentieth-century writing career. Vargas Llosa retells the incredible story of an anti-government rebellion by a community of religious fanatics and the ensuing war between these fanatics and the equally fervent government soldiers. As is all too often the case with such seemingly “incredible” Latin American stories, the happenings in the Brazilian town of Canudos—mentioned briefly above—are based on actual historical events of the late 1890s. The setting and historical context provided anecdotal material for what is one of Vargas Llosa’s best novels. Many of his previous attitudes, themes, and narrative techniques are fully elaborated in La guerra del fin del mundo. Nevertheless, it is a more accessible novel than his previous work of epic proportions, Conversación en La Catedral.

According to Vargas Llosa, he had never been so fascinated with a story as with that of Canudos.55 His fabrication on the topic in novelistic form is the result of both chance and labor, such as research in Lima, Bahia, and the Library of Congress. Chance came into play when a Brazilian film director asked him to write a filmscript for a movie using Canudos as a backdrop. Since the Peruvian knew nothing of the subject, he read the classic book in Brazilian literature, Rebellion in the Backlands (1902, Os Sertões) by Euclides da Cunha. He then spent several months writing the script—but the film was never made. Nevertheless, he decided to write the novel because in the history of Canudos one could see something, according to the author, that had been present in Latin American history over the course of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries: the total lack of communication between two sectors of society.⁵⁶

The initial response among critics and readers to this “adventure story,” as the author himself has called it, was uniformly enthusiastic. One of Latin America’s most respected critics at the time, Ángel Rama, judged La guerra del fin del mundo a masterpiece that future generations would consider a key Latin American novel of the second half of the twentieth century.⁵⁷ It became an immediate best seller in the Hispanic world, and remained so for over a year. The French translation was a bestseller in France. When it appeared in English, two years after Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter had popularized Vargas Llosa’s name among North American readers, a reviewer for the New York Times called it a “powerful and haunting” novel, and the New York Times Book Review singled it out as one of the twelve best books of the year.⁵⁸ Another review of The War of the End of the World proclaimed Vargas Llosa one of the “world’s best writers.”⁵⁹ The general consensus among the book reviewers and initial scholarly articles in the early 1980s was that this was one of the most outstanding novels by one of Latin America’s most accomplished writers.

The anecdotal material for La guerra del fin del mundo, then, came from a historical book, the Brazilian text titled Rebellion in the Back-lands. Vargas Llosa had long maintained that the novelist and the historian are closely allied: “Rescuer and verbal gravedigger of an epoch, the great novelist is a kind of vulture: the putrefied flesh of history is his favorite nourishment and has served to inspire him to his most audacious undertakings.”60 In this case, Vargas Llosa, the “verbal gravedigger,” made use of this unusual text to unravel that “putrid flesh of history.” Rebellion in the Backlands is an unorthodox combination of imaginative fiction, documentary history, and sundry essays. After having worked several years as a journalist, da  Cunha was sent to the town of Canudos in 1896 to cover the uprising for a newspaper known as Estado do São Paulo. Five years after the fall of Canudos, da Cunha’s magnum opus of more than five hundred pages appeared, in 1902. It should not be surprising that Vargas Llosa was so impressed by this work: it has been considered by some critics to be Brazil’s greatest book, and by many Brazilians as a “Bible of Brazilian nationality.”

To place Canudos in a general historical context: Brazil’s people gained independence in 1899 when Dom Pedro II and the empire were overthrown. The ruling oligarchy in Brazil (a parallel group, historically, with the old oligarchy in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America) had already been challenged in 1888, when slavery was abolished. Forging a unified Brazil was a vital problem of the subsequent period. Regional, political, and economic conflicts undermined stability, and, before Canudos, there had already been a counterrevolutionary revolt in 1893–1894 that had threatened the nascent and fragile republic.

The general setting of Vargas Llosa’s novel was, therefore, rural northeastern Brazil, the town of Canudos and surrounding villages, the city of Bahia, and a weak new nation. The original Spanish edition of La guerra del fin del mundo featured a full-page reproduction of a painting of Canudos: the simple portrait shows an idyllic village with three large buildings (one of which is a church), a small cemetery (with twelve crosses), and a hundred or so little huts. Da Cunha had offered the following description: “Canudos, an old cattle ranch on the banks of Vasa-Barris [river] was in 1890 a backwoods hamlet of around five-hundred mud-thatched wooden shanties.”⁶¹

The background to the conflict was the arrival in Canudos in 1893 of a bizarre individual named Antônio Conselheiro; his life and personality were in themselves material for a novel. He had spent years wandering through the backlands regions as a type of roving missionary—giving sermons and advice to the poor, living parsimoniously, and helping to repair local churches and cemeteries. With time, he became a popular legend, indeed a Christlike figure. Once he was settled in Canudos, his following grew rapidly; the town’s expanded population was a motley crowd of the poor and outcast, including some of the region’s most feared criminals. All were or became fanatic religious followers of Conselheiro. (In the translation into English of The War of the End of the World the narrator calls him “Antonio the Counselor,” although some characters refer to him as “Antonio Conselheiro.”)

His followers, the Jagunços of Canudos, were soon faced with defending Canudos against four major attacks by government soldiers. The fervent peasants soundly defeated the government’s first contingent of one hundred. After the Jagunços viciously destroyed the second army of five hundred, the war in Canudos became an event of national significance for this struggling nation. Consequently, the successful, and even renowned, colonel Antônio Moreira César, with some twelve hundred soldiers, was sent to Canudos. The confident Moreira César, along with many of his soldiers, was brutally massacred. In an extended final battle, more than three thousand national troops, supported by heavy artillery, razed Canudos and killed its one thousand inhabitants.

Rebellion in the Backlands possesses several features that would logically appeal to a writer like Vargas Llosa, if not openly “seduce” (to use his literary language) him. Since at least 1958 (as he read Spanish and Catalonian novels of chivalry), he has been fascinated with the idea of the “total novel,” to which many novelists aspire (see part III). What seems to have attracted Vargas Llosa most, however, was its aspect of adventure story. He has written of his attraction to the adventures of the novel of chivalry—above all, Tirant lo Blanc—and to such writers as Jules Verne and Dumas. Rebellion in the Backlands, particularly in the final chapters, contains much of the human drama and sanguine violence that is omnipresent in the novel of chivalry in general and Tirant lo Blanc in particular.

The original Spanish edition of La guerra del fin del mundo includes a full-page reproduction of a painting of “The Fanatic Antônio Conselheiro”—a kind of tribute to the “priest” and da Cunha’s popularization of him. Both the Spanish and English editions of La guerra del fin del mundo contain a dedication “To Euclides da Cunha.” These are Vargas Llosa’s only direct references to da Cunha in the entire novel.

With this dedication, Vargas Llosa makes an interesting change in focus: if his first five books are inevitably redolent of foreign writers (Flaubert and Faulkner), La guerra del fin del mundo grows not only from these two writers, but from a Brazilian. The plot does not engage the reader in the intricacies and complexities of multidimensional time or the juxtaposition of planes of reality, such as are found in the first three novels. Rather, La guerra del fin del mundo overwhelms with the cumulative effect of seemingly endless detail and the intensity of human drama. In this sense, it falls within the tradition of the canonical novelists of the nineteenth century, whom Vargas Llosa admires above all, Tolstoy, as well as the novel of chivalry.

La guerra del fin del mundo consists of four parts, each of which contains between three and seven chapters. Most chapters contain four or five brief narrative segments, usually three to eight pages in length. Part I (120 pages) has seven chapters, each with four narrative segments. Part II (only 11 pages) contains only three brief chapters, with no divisions into narrative segments. Part III (209 pages) offers seven chapters, each with five narrative segments. Part IV (215 pages) contains six chapters, each with four narrative segments. Although this introductory description may make the book appear similar in organization to La casa verde or Conversación en La Catedral, the novels are comparable in only the most superficial way: unlike the technically complex Faulknerian novels of the 1960s, La guerra del fin del mundo is basically straightforward narration related, for the most part, by a controlling omniscient voice. In this sense it was Vargas Llosa’s most traditional novel when it appeared in 1981.

Part I of La guerra del fin del mundo provides an introduction to most of the main characters, and to the general historical and political setting. By the end of part I, the people of Canudos have stunned the government’s soldiers by defeating the first two armies sent to the backlands to place the rebellious fanatics under control. The major characters introduced in part I are Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel (always called “the Counselor”), Galileo Gall, and Epaminondas Goncalves. The narrator presents the Counselor as a special and extraordinary individual, portraying him as a living legend and, by the end of part I, a Jesus-type figure. In addition to descriptions of a panoply of characters in part I, this portion of the book includes a government version of the situation: one narrative segment provides the account of the military officer Pires Ferreira’s defeat in Canudos.

Following the introduction of the characters and the intensity of the military action in part I—involving the two clashes between the inhabitants of Canudos and government soldiers—part II functions as a brief interlude. The reader is afforded the opportunity to distance himself from Canudos and view the situation as it is seen through the press in Bahia (Salvador): an editorial from the Jornal de Notícias dated January 3, 1897, appears in its entirety. This text accuses the aristocratic and conservative forces in Brazil of having collaborated with the English in fomenting the rebellion in Canudos. Conversations between a news paper employee identified only as a “nearsighted journalist” and Goncalves precede and follow this editorial prepared by the myopic journalist.

Part III of the novel, like the third act of a traditional four-act play, complicates the plot and intensifies the human drama. Two characters who will have an enormous impact appear on the scene: Colonel Moreira César and the Baron of Canabrava. Moreira César arrives at the rural town of Queimadas as a hero of the Brazilian republic. Neither he nor the citizens of the republic have the slightest doubt that he will save it from the fanatics in the north. Much of part III involves the slow advancement of his troops upon Canudos and their positioning for battle. From the point of view of the Baron of Canabrava, whom the reader observes discussing politics with Adalberto de Gumúcio, the military represents a threat to the power of the landed aristocracy (latifundistas): a military victory in Canudos could precipitate a sweep into power.

Part IV is dedicated almost entirely to the final siege of Canudos, which eventually destroys the Jagunços and all remnants of the town. The first three chapters describe the preparations for the siege and the beginnings of the battle. The last three chapters, functioning as a type of epilogue, relate, after the fact, what has happened in Canudos.

Even this brief plot résumé suggests several ways in which Vargas Llosa used da Cunha to tell the story of Canudos. The two most outstanding parallels are the characterization of the Counselor and of Colonel Moreira César. Vargas Llosa re-creates the two persons described by da Cunha, changing certain details and allowing his imagination to invent others. For example, the purple tunic that drapes over the Counselor in Rebellion in the Backlands becomes a blue one in La guerra del fin del mundo. Some of da Cunha’s dates and facts also filter into Vargas Llosa’s text: the 5,200 dwellings from da Cunha’s documentation become a similar 5,783 in La guerra del fin del mundo. Though the numbers are not identical, they respond to a similar impulse toward documentation. Other direct comparisons between the two texts can be, and have been, made.62 Vargas Llosa’s lifetime allegiance to Borges, who seems like such a different writer, can be seen here: exercising the right of invention is what Vargas Llosa learned from Borges, and in La guerra del fin del mundo he exercises this right freely.

The most compelling relationship between the two books, however, is not to be found by comparing dwellings and such as they appear in Canudos. Rather, the general pattern is more interesting than the specific details in making comparisons: da Cunha was an indefatigable researcher and Brazilian nationalist who seemingly attempted to write the “total” Brazilian book; Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, both attempts to resist the totalizing impulse and succumbs to it with his vast material. Da Cunha relates a plethora of facts and situations, but his book acquires the drama of a story only at the end; Vargas Llosa limits himself more to telling numerous stories which, interwoven and experienced in their totality, are still overwhelmingly powerful human drama. In this sense the Peruvian writer has selectively transformed a massive human circumstance into a more complete and more wholly human story. The nearsighted journalist in La guerra del fin del mundo, always awkward and inadequate, seems to play the role of da Cunha the journalist: he haphazardly gets the information but, in reality, fails to tell the story.

As in Vargas Llosa’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s, plot in itself is once again a predominant factor. The challenging element for the reader of this novel is the density and length of the story, rather than intercalated dialogues or complex relationships between fictional readers and writers. Narrative technique is not in itself such an explicit issue, and the effects of Vargas Llosa’s techniques are more subtle than in his more overtly Faulknerian texts.

Some of Vargas Llosa’s constant thematic concerns reappear in La guerra del fin del mundo. The fanaticism that emanates from both Canudos and some Republicans has traces of the attitudes of a Pantaleón Pantoja or a Pedro Camacho. Once again, Vargas Llosa exploits the humorous potential of fanaticism, although the experience of this novel is predominantly tragic rather than comic. The novelist places in question the potential of the purely rational in comprehending empirical reality. Rather than questioning this reality by undermining it, as in La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral, in La guerra del fin del mundo the rational is called into question by means of the characterization of Galileo Gall, who is one of the most intellectual and rational individuals, as well as one of the most flagrant fools, of the novel. The presence of the military and its paternal authority figures, most evident before in La ciudad y los perros and Pantaleón y las visitadoras, is once again ushered forth as a central preoccupation. The fanaticism, rigidity, and stupidity of these authority and military figures in this novel make them victims, once again, of Vargas Llosa’s critical and occasionally satirical pen. (Again, the father figure reappears as the ongoing “demon,” or trauma.)

Like La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo develops characters who function as part of a vast network of human relationships. The novel abounds in characters, and they all eventually not only relate to the whole, but survive or die as part of this network. Several characters gain their humanity by means of their relationship with the Counselor. They also perish as part of a human grouping that has been bonded by the Counselor’s story. As in the novels of the 1960s and 1970s, characters seem to relate to each other in ways that are sometimes surprisingly coincidental. These paradoxes reaffirm Vargas Llosa’s vision of how individual acts affect the whole, and vice versa.

Fanaticism is one factor that motivates characters in La guerra del fin del mundo, although it is not the predominant one. By dealing with fanaticism Vargas Llosa has continued to explore a facet of human behavior fictionalized in the character of Father García of La casa verde, Captain Pantoja of Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and Pedro Camacho of La tía Julia y el escribidor. He brings fanatic attitudes to the realm of contemporary politics in a later novel, Historia de Mayta, and to the realm of nineteenth-century politics in the twenty-first-century work El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003, The Way to Paradise).

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In 1983 the president of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, invited Vargas Llosa to take a lead role in the investigation, as part of an appointed commission, of a national disaster in rural Peru: eight journalists had been assassinated in the town of Uchuraccay. By now the Shining Path guerrilla group was active in rural Peru, and there were abundant, and conflicting, rumors and theories about exactly how the journalists had died. The region had been through a period of tensions and occasional direct conflicts between the local indigenous people and the Shining Path.

Vargas Llosa accepted the president’s invitation, traveled to Uchuraccay with the commission, and interviewed the people residing in and around the town at the time of the assassinations. The commission reached the conclusion that the local villagers in Huaychao had killed the journalists by mistake, believing that they were members of Shining Path. Once the commission’s findings were published, the polemics immediately began; some individuals and groups in Peru claimed that the report was a defense of the government and its policies regarding both indigenous groups and the Shining Path. Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, published letters sent from several countries, giving his assurances that the commission’s report was written with complete independence from the government. Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa’s report on Uchuraccay has remained a matter of discussions—and critiques of Vargas Llosa himself—well into the twenty-first century. The massacre had been fully exposed to international scrutiny when Vargas Llosa himself published an article in Peru’s Oiga, which ran later, in translation, in the New York Times Magazine.63

In the 1980s, Vargas Llosa returned to one of his lifetime interests, which had begun in his early adolescence—theater. Indeed, one of his early adolescent, pre-professional creations had been a play, La huida del Inca, performed when he was in high school. His professional career as a playwright in the 1980s began with La señorita de Tacna, which premiered in the theater capital of Latin America, Buenos Aires, in May 1981. Later it was presented in Chile, Uruguay, Spain, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Madrid. He followed this in 1983 with Kathie y el hipopótamo (Kathie and the hippopotamus), which also has had numerous performances since its premier in Caracas in April 1983. In 1986 he came forth with the play La Chunga.

La señorita de Tacna is a two-act play dealing on the surface with aging, the family, pride, and individual destiny. It also confronts a more comprehensive topic that begins appearing with some regularity in the 1980s: how and why stories are born. In Vargas Llosa’s prefatory remarks to this play he asks the question: Why do humans need to tell stories? This question reappears in the novel El hablador and other later fiction.

The principal characters in this play are an aged spinster named Mamaé and her great-nephew, Belisario, a writer in his forties or fifties. The physical set is fundamental to the plot: a division of the stage into two halves provides the performance space for the two main story lines. On one side is the modest middle-class apartment of Mamaé’s grand parents, located in Lima in the 1950s. The other half of the stage is Belisario’s study, located “anywhere in the world in the year 1980.” Belisario’s setting is simple and realistic: it is a typical little study before the computer age, with a desk, lots of papers, and a typewriter. The other setting, however, is unrealistic because it exists as Belisario’s memory and changes to other places and time periods: the home where Grandmother and Mamaé lived as children in Tacna (a town in the extreme south of Peru), another in Arequipa (Vargas Llosa’s birthplace), and a house in Bolivia (where Vargas Llosa lived the first eight years of his childhood). Belisario remembers anecdotes from the family’s life, and occasionally interacts with characters from the other half of the stage. These anecdotes relate stories of Mamaé’s failed marriage with a Chilean military officer, the proud family’s growing economic difficulties, and, finally, Mamaé’s death.

Kathie y el hipopótamo is another two-act play related to the act of storytelling. The stories and characters are in constant transformation, making any attempted résumé of the plot a questionable undertaking. The two main characters, Kathie Kennety and Santiago Zavala (from Conversación en La Catedral), are accompanied by Ana de Zavala (Santiago’s wife) and Juan, who play out roles according to situations created by Kathie and Santiago. The entire story takes place in Kathie’s buhardilla de París (always in quotation marks in the text; her “Parisian apartment” is located in Lima). The scenes of the play are remembered or invented by Kathie and Santiago.

These two plays were reasonably well received on their merits in much of the Hispanic world. Within the body of Vargas Llosa’s total work, however, they are less substantive than his novels and of primary interest largely within the context of his fiction or as light entertainment. Even a passing glance at the plays will discern characters and situations from the novels: Santiago Zavala from Conversación en La Catedral, Pedro Camacho from La tía Julia y el escribidor, journalists, writers, and many of the frustrations and failures of Peruvian life suffered by characters from La ciudad y los perros to La guerra del fin del mundo. Beyond these obvious points of contact, there are more significant confluences of Vargas Llosa’s fiction and theater of the 1980s.

Most of Vargas Llosa’s fiction contains elements of theater. Mention has been made of the development of conflict in Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La guerra del fin del mundo as in a traditional play. Four of Vargas Llosa’s early novels—La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, and Pantaleón y las visitadoras—are highly dialogic. Conversación en La Catedral represented, in the late 1960s, Vargas Llosa’s most elaborate fabrication of a novel of dialogue, while Pantaleón y las visitadoras in fact contains only a few narrative segments that are not dialogue. Given his preference for using direct dialogue to narrate a story, it is hardly surprising that Vargas Llosa would ultimately turn to the artistic form of pure dialogue, theater.

Vargas Llosa has discussed the “total novel” in his essays, and has written works such as Conversación en La Catedral and La guerra del fin del mundo that seemingly aspire to such grandiose comprehensiveness. He explains in his introductory remarks to Kathie y el hipopótamo that the totalizing impulse was a factor for him in this play: “Perhaps it isn’t necessary to say that in this farce I have attempted, as in my novels, to attain an illusion of totality.”

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Between 1983 and 1987 Vargas Llosa continued his intense itinerary of travel for invited lectures and for research related to his future novel projects. During this period he published three novels: Historia de Mayta, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, and El hablador. These are very different novels that originated from different periods of the author’s life.

Historia de Mayta was born in Paris in 1962 when Vargas Llosa read in Le Monde about the first case of an armed and violent insurrection in Peru; this came to serve as the point of departure for the novel. This work can be seen as a reaction to political violence that began in 1962 and culminated in the massacre of eight journalists in 1983. By the 1980s, Vargas Llosa had become deeply affected by Peru’s recent history of violence: “This is what I wanted, at least in my novel, to be clear: that violence at a certain point lacks ideology.”64 The key event in Historia de Mayta takes place in Jauja, the town about which Vargas Llosa had read in Le Monde in 1962. An armed rebellion in this Andean village in 1958 had failed in its goal to overthrow the government. In fact, it was a disorganized and ill-conceived local uprising in which the majority of the participants were high school students; an aged Trotskyite and an impulsive young idealist had orchestrated the event. Soon after the publication of the novel, a Peruvian magazine published an article about the person on whom Vargas Llosa’s character Mayta is principally based: Jacinto Rentería.⁶⁵ According to this article, Rentería was the Trotskyite in the Jauja uprising.

Historia de Mayta is a ten-chapter novel that features Mayta and a novelist as its main characters. The novelist, who appears to be a Mario Vargas Llosa figure but is never named, is the narrator within the story. The narrator-novelist relates, in the present tense, conditions in Peru and his efforts to reconstruct Mayta’s story. He attempts to carry out this task by soliciting and listening to the testimonies of persons who had known Mayta under various circumstances. Each chapter features, primarily, one person’s version of Mayta’s life; the last chapter is an encounter between the novelist and Mayta.

Those whom the novelist seeks out include his ex-girlfriend, Jauja’s eminent Marxist professor, a leftist Peruvian senator, and several political collaborators. As might be expected, many of their anecdotes and ideas about Mayta are contradictory. Some portray him as revolutionary and ideologically well founded; others describe an emotional young man unable to define a political position and who even worked with the CIA. While most believe he was the organizer of the Jauja disaster, some describe his participation in Jauja as marginal. His ex-girlfriend affirms that Mayta is homosexual; Mayta disclaims this to the narrator-novelist. Even though it is to be expected that different persons would present varying points of view on Mayta, at the conclusion of the novel he is seen simply as a contradictory and confused individual who failed to gain whatever political objectives he might have had.

The contemporary (1980s) Peru of the narrator-novelist’s “present” is a poor and strife-ridden nation seemingly headed toward absolute chaos. The narrator-novelist occasionally muses on the situation, and cannot avoid noticing his surroundings as he moves from witness to witness. In one scene, he briefly observes the working poor, whose modest and monotonous lives are illustrative of good fortune when compared to the unemployed and destitute street people of Lima. According to the senator, the social and political deterioration in Peru has reached new extremes. The general malaise and violent rural situation indicate a nation on the verge of collapse.

When Vargas Llosa was a child living in Bolivia, he imagined a fictional Peru populated by heroic Incas. Four decades later, he invented a vastly different country, but still presented a basically fictional and literary nation. It is literary not because its people are culturally sophisticated but rather because its reality is communicated and understood in a literary fashion. Since the circumstances are so strange, Peruvian life becomes literary. There are several allusions in the text to Peru as a fictional entity. The narrator also remarks that his goal is not to write a “true history” but to use multiple and contradictory versions of Mayta’s life to fabricate a story.

On several occasions during the 1980s Vargas Llosa explained his ambiguous relationship with Peru, describing how the nation had been a “passion” and “disease” for him; a phenomenon with the emotion and nuances of a love/hate relationship. After a hiatus of over a decade—marked by excursions into humor and into nineteenth-century Brazil—Vargas Llosa returns to his passion by making Peru itself the central topic of Historia de Mayta.

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In November 1983 Vargas Llosa visited Washington University in St. Louis with an invitation to enter into dialogue with three audiences: he gave a public lecture in English to the campus community and public at large; he visited the faculty and graduate students in Spanish for a discussion in Spanish about his work; and he visited the faculty and graduate students in French for a discussion in French about his relationship with French writers. Given Vargas Llosa’s known interest in “literary fetishism,” a key component of the invitation was a visit to Hannibal, Missouri, along the Mississippi River, to see the Mark Twain home and museum. In his essays, Vargas Llosa has written of his activities as a literary fetishist: when living in Paris in the 1960s he took every opportunity to visit the homes of French writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Rousseau. In Hannibal, Vargas Llosa leafed through first editions of Twain’s work and was fascinated by the objects that were part of Twain’s everyday life.

In 1984 and 1985 Vargas Llosa continued his busy schedule on the lecture circuit, with trips from Lima to Paris, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, and elsewhere. In April 1986 he accepted a second invitation to Washington University in St. Louis, where he arrived with Patricia for a month’s visit. He followed his lifetime routine of writing in the morning, with an interruption early in the morning for a jog, which was his frequent physical activity in the 1980s and 1990s. This time, his practice of literary fetishism involved a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, where he visited the Faulkner tomb in Oxford and the Faulkner collection in the library of the University of Mississippi, as well as Rowan Oak, the Faulkner home and museum. He left flowers at Faulkner’s tomb.

Vargas Llosa published his eighth novel, his nod to detective fiction, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, in 1986. Sargent Lituma of La casa verde reappears in this brief entertainment—the third of six of these light works—which takes place in the 1950s. Lituma and his sidekick Silva pursue the assassin of Palomino Molero, a young soldier in love with a young woman named Alicia Mindrau. While they interview persons who knew the young lovers, Silva has fantasies of a sexual encounter with a woman of seemingly little physical attraction, doña Adriana. Just as Lituma and Silva piece together an idea of the potential killer, so does the reader. In the sixth chapter, Alicia Mindrau confesses that she had been the lover of the deceased, and it appears that her father, Colonel Mindrau, is the culprit. After Colonel Mindrau commits suicide, his guilt seems confirmed. In the last chapter, however, the issue of the guilty party is not resolved, and the locals continue believing, as they have all along, that some “peces gordos” (big fish) are the culprits. The principle interest of the story is not actually to determine the identity of the criminals, but to reveal prejudices that lead to several deaths.

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After their stay in St. Louis that April, Mario and Patricia traveled to London, where they were planning, in principle, to reestablish a permanent residence. In July 1987, nevertheless, they left London for Peru to vacation on the beaches of northern Peru in Punta Sal, where they heard the stunning and upsetting news that President Alan García had declared the nationalization of all the banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions. Just two days into his vacation, relaxation abandoned the Peruvian public intellectual, who immediately published an article about “totalitarian Peru,” which appeared in the widely read newspaper El Comercio on August 2, 1987. In this article Vargas Llosa opposed the presidential decision, encouraging Peruvians to exhaust all legal means to oppose García’s measures, if they wanted democracy to survive in Peru. Vargas Llosa did not remain in Peru, but returned to London in October and made Great Britain his primary residence until early 1988.

The novel El hablador, marking Vargas Llosa’s return to the Peruvian jungle, appeared in 1987. It is also his return to matters set forth in the play Kathie y el hipopótamo concerning storytelling. As alluded to above, the act of storytelling in itself has fascinated Vargas Llosa from the early days, when he first discovered that seemingly irrational and unplanned factors played an important role in his creative process. Is there something deeply human in the need to tell stories? What are the functions of storytelling for the individual and for society at large? These and related questions are addressed in this novel and in other writings of the 1980s. When he began writing El hablador in 1985, Vargas Llosa had already explored various traditional forms of storytelling: the grand tradition of the novel of chivalry (which he had discovered in Madrid in 1958 and about which he had written essays in the late 1960s and early 1970s), the nineteenth-century European novel (with his book-length essay on Flaubert), and the techniques of major modernists of the twentieth century, beginning with Faulkner. Vargas Llosa’s fascination with story telling, however, has not been limited to the most complex forms of high literary culture. In La tía Julia y el escribidor, for example, Vargas Llosa had explored one of the most mundane forms of storytelling, the soap opera. With El hablador, Vargas Llosa returns to the Peruvian Amazon to consider one of the most ancient forms of storytelling, the oral tradition.

The critical reception of El hablador has been generally positive, and academic studies of this novel have focused on the use of oral tradition, the representation of indigenous peoples, biographical elements, and intertextuality. In the opinion of Sara Castro-Klarén, Vargas Llosa attains a successful representation of the Machiguenga masculine subject, as well as a continuation of the autobiographical trend in his fiction.66

With El hablador, Vargas Llosa embarks on one of his most risky narrative adventures as a writer by attempting to incorporate into a written text the oral tradition of indigenous people (the Machiguengas). This project involves adventure and risk because it is relatively rare in the second half of the twentieth century for a novelist to attempt to tell stories from the perspective of the contador or hablador, i.e., the oral storyteller. In this sense, the creation of this novel was the biggest risk Vargas Llosa had taken since deciding to temporarily abandon his “total novel” projects and explore humor with Pantaleón y las visitadoras.

In addition to the adventure and risk involved with this novel, it also represents a certain continuity in his writing, in at least two senses. On the one hand, Vargas Llosa returns to one of his favorite devices: the use of the “communicating vessels” (vasos comunicantes) in which the narrative moves back and forth between the voice of the principal narrator and the voice of the storyteller (hablador). On the other hand, the presence of oral culture is an exploration of an interest evident, in a minor way, in the previous novels La casa verde and La guerra del fin del mundo.

In El hablador, the principal narrator, “Mario-narrator,” is a character—similar in some ways to the author Mario Vargas Llosa—who writes from Florence, Italy, about his experience of discovering some photographs there that remind him of some of his experiences in the Amazon jungle. This “Mario-narrator” narrates chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8—five of the novel’s eight chapters. “Mario-narrator” is fascinated with everything related to oral storytelling, an interest that begins when he makes his first trip to the Amazon and hears about habladores (storytellers) among the Machiguengas and culminates in his discovery of a character named Saúl Zuratas, who is an oral storyteller in the jungle. The remaining chapters—3, 5, 7—are narrated by an hablador who is a member of the Machiguenga tribe. Near the end of the novel the reader realizes that this storyteller is, in fact, a Caucasian person who has become assimilated into the indigenous community. This person turns out to be Saúl Zuratas, a Peruvian of Jewish descent who had appeared in the chapters narrated by “Mario-narrator.” In chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8, then, Saúl appears as a person marginalized by society in Lima because of a physical defect: an enormous lunar (birthmark) that covers half of his face. In chapters 3, 5, and 7 he is a convincing oral storyteller of indigenous tales and is identified as an hablador. Consequently, this is a novel about acculturation, but the story is the opposite of the conventional story of acculturation.

The interest in popular forms of storytelling is just one of the several parallels with La tía Julia y el escribidor. In the latter, Vargas Llosa develops the story of a writer of soap operas who is an obsessive creator of fictions. He is an interesting character precisely because of his obsession. In El hablador, the parallel character is Saúl Zuritas, a person who is as obsessed with indigenous culture as Pedro Camacho is with his soap operas.

The reader’s surprise in this novel is to discover that the supposed Machiguenga storyteller (hablador) is not a Machiguenga at all. Vargas Llosa leaves clues early in the novel that this might be the case. The most noteworthy aspect of El hablador, however, is neither this surprise nor Vargas Llosa’s interest in indigenous cultures, an interest he shares with José María Arguedas, Rosario Castellanos, and a plethora of other Latin American writers. Rather, the unique aspect of El hablador is the interaction between the two story lines, between oral culture and writing culture. Saúl’s process of apprenticeship (his learning how to tell stories) is a mirror image of the same process learned by the “Mario-narrator” figure, the Peruvian in Florence who, in Europe, learns how to tell modern stories in the European manner. In the end, both storytellers are successful: Saúl assimilates so successfully that he becomes an hablador (storyteller); the “Mario-narrator” becomes so interested in European culture that he becomes a Peruvian novelist.

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In early 1988, a few months after his public criticism of President Alan García, Vargas Llosa and Patricia returned to Lima. His life became intensely political for the next three years, including his announcing his candidacy for the presidency of Peru in June 1989.

At different stages of his life he had lived the Peruvian social and political situation intensely, particularly during his years in the Leoncio Prado military school, and in the early 1950s when he worked as a journalist. From July 1987, when he wrote his open letter to Alan García, to June 1990, Vargas Llosa made Peruvian political life his primary focus. During this period, he founded the Movimiento Libertad, he participated in the Frente Democrático, and he was active in his presidential campaign. During these three years he read and wrote relatively little, although he had signed a contract to write brief introductions for a Spanish publishing company as prefaces to classics of Western literature. (Later, these essays appeared together in a book titled La verdad de las mentiras [The truth of lies].) He also read classical poetry of the Spanish seventeenth-century Golden Age as a literary discipline.

The political and economic situation in Peru had been deteriorating during the 1970s and 1980s. In October 1968, the military, under the leadership of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, carried out a coup d’état against President Fernando Belaúnde Terry. They installed a military government from 1968 to 1975, with the goal of opening Peruvian society to the working people. With a better-educated leadership than most military governments in Latin America, it made gestures toward much-needed agrarian reform and redistribution of wealth. The military government also nationalized much of the industrial sector and mining. It eventually imposed different forms of censorship of the press, however, leading Vargas Llosa to send an open letter of protest to Velasco Alvarado. Years later, in the late 1980s, Vargas Llosa’s political program for Peru was the opposite of the strong state power and economic intervention of this military regime.

Amid the chaos of the final year of Velasco Alvarado’s regime, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez assumed control of the government in August. His government (1975–1980), as well as those of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980–1985) and Alan García (1985–1990), was inefficient and unsuccessful in confronting the nation’s growing political and economic crises. Alan García and the APRA took over in 1985 with 53 percent of the popular vote, but with 90 percent of the population supporting García’s measures during the first year of his government. By the end of 1986, Peru’s economy was growing at a rate of 8.6 percent, the highest in Latin America. Nevertheless, by the end of his five-year presidency, Peru was in one of its worse crisis periods: in 1990 Alan García had the support of only 10 percent of the population and an inflation rate of 20,000 percent.

Complicating things even more was the situation with armed guerrilla movements. The initial guerrilla movements of the 1960s, inspired by Che Guevara, had been weak and disorganized in Peru. Hugo Blanco and Javier Heraud (about whom Vargas Llosa wrote brief articles in the 1960s) had organized small guerrilla groups in the mountains. Soon after their training in Cuba, however, these leaders were imprisoned and not liberated until 1970. By June 1965, Luis de la Puente Uceda had begun the guerrilla movement identified as MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario) in rural parts of the departments of Cuzco and Junín.

The roots of the Shining Path (Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario por el Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui) go back to 1970, when Abimael Guzmán, a professor of philosophy in Ayacucho, founded this movement. He remained the intellectual and political leader of the group until his arrest in 1992. From 1970 to 1977 the Shining Path was a relatively invisible political group that dedicated itself primarily to education. Drawing upon ideas from Mariátegui and Mao, the Shining Path used ideas from socialism as well as the defense of the rights of indigenous peoples. By the mid-1970s, the Shining Path had expanded its following and regional activity in Peru, recruiting the rural poor and the economically marginalized in urban areas. The Shining Path began its “popular war” (or “peoples’ war”) against the Peruvian state on May 17, 1980, with a series of violent attacks on the eve of the first democratic elections in more than a decade. On March 2, 1982, they attacked a prison in Ayacucho, freeing fifty-four of their followers. By 1983 the Shining Path’s violent attacks against the state and its economic infrastructure had increased, and did not come to an end until the mid-1990s. From 1985 to the early 1990s, the Shining Path controlled most of the valley of Huallaga, collaborating in this region with Colombian drug traffickers. By the mid-1980s, the Shining Path had a presence in all regions of Peru. During this period, the guerrilla group also carried out a series of assassinations of government officials and leaders of the APRA. By the end of the 1980s, they were supporting several minority political parties as legal arms of the Shining Path. The Shining Path clearly represented a considerably strong political force in Peru by the end of the 1980s. Indeed, the immediate future of Peru appeared to be grim.

This was the complex and difficult political and economic scenario which Vargas Llosa entered on August 21, 1987, when he joined the political arena as an active participant rather than the distant critic he had always been. His most prominent political act prior to writing his public letter to Alan García had been his revolutionary acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas in 1967 and his prologue for Hernando Soto’s polemical book El otro sendero (The other path), which had appeared in print in August 1986. In this prologue, Vargas Llosa uses a new political discourse based on his readings in the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, of Hayek, Friedman, and their cohorts. In his new, exclusively political discourse, he presents Soto’s study of the “informal economy,” or what in some countries is called a “marginal” or “black” market. For Vargas Llosa, Soto’s book represents an effort to create a concrete, practical economic proposal, rather than one that Vargas Llosa considers too abstract and too typical of the abstract foolishness of what often passes as economic writing in Latin America.

Vargas Llosa’s central idea (as well as Soto’s) is that in the recent history of Peru, the state has been more of an interference (“estorbo” in the original Spanish) than a stimulus for the economy, thus encouraging many, particularly among the less privileged, to seek refuge in the “informal economy” (i.e., black market). Vargas Llosa and Soto claim that it is virtually impossible to legalize a new business in Peru, given the complexity and slowness of the state bureaucracy, without a bribe or long wait. For Vargas Llosa, the bureaucratic and regulatory Peru is a caricature of the state in Latin America. Instead of being a democratic state, Peru is a discriminating and elitist nation that manipulates minorities—entities that it considers insignificant—to its advantage. Vargas Llosa claims that the state should not only redistribute the resources, but produce wealth. His prologue also contains something of Vargas-Llosa-thenovelist—the opening sentences suggest that sometimes economists tell better stories than novelists. Despite these literary touches to his essay, it is noteworthy that by 1986 Vargas Llosa had published an essay with a strictly political and economic focus, offering a new political alternative for Peru.

Although this essay might well represent Vargas Llosa’s unconscious entrance into the Peruvian political arena, his first visible public political act took place on August 21, 1987, in downtown Lima, at the Plaza San Martín. President García’s announcement of his plan to nationalize the banking industry in Peru was the most recent of several measures that, according to Vargas Llosa, were destined to subvert democracy and the economy of Peru. Consequently, the author accepted an invitation to participate in the public demonstration on August 21. Surprisingly, some one hundred thousand supporters appeared at this public event to hear Vargas Llosa’s words. The centerpiece for his speech was a national call for a remaking of Peruvian institutions in the interest of “liberty” (libertad), a key word in Vargas Llosa’s political program in Peru and political thinking in general since the mid-1980s. Reflecting on this political event, Vargas Llosa’s son Álvaro, who was there, stated three years later: “Yo sentía que estábamos en campaña” (“I felt we were in a campaign”).67 He then continued his campaign against the nationalization of the banking industry, giving speeches in Arequipa and Piura, thus gathering a national visibility to his cause.

Vargas Llosa returned to London in late 1987, where he dedicated himself to his literary projects once again. He went daily to the British Museum to work on a book about which he had been thinking for several years: a study of the fiction of Victor Hugo. Politics had consumed much of his writing time in recent months, and on Sundays, telephone conversations with the family kept him abreast of the political situation in Peru. In early 1988 he accepted an invitation to deliver a lecture in Iquitos on his most recent novel, El hablador, but the minute he arrived in Peru there were immediate and inevitable political consequences of his presence in his homeland. He was very well received in Iquitos; his son Álvaro noted that even though everyone resisted using the word “candidate,” it was understood that Mario Vargas Llosa was beginning to forge a presidential campaign.⁶⁸

Amid this political activity in 1988, Vargas Llosa published his eleventh novel, Elogio de la madrastra, a short novel of fourteen chapters and an epilogue with some of the old and some of the new elements of Vargas Llosa’s fiction. This is his fourth of six entertainments. It deals with eroticism and play more elaborately than does his previous fiction. A new topic, and one that some of Vargas Llosa’s cohorts of the 1960s Boom, such as García Márquez, were beginning to fictionalize, also entered into Mario’s novelistic world for the first time: aging. Perhaps as a gesture toward some of the postmodern writers of world fiction, from Borges to Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino, Vargas Llosa reminds us in Elogio de la madrastra that all fiction is artifice. As in his previous novels, Vargas Llosa uses his “communicating vessels”—alternating between two types of chapters that affect each other. This novel functions on the basis of the interaction between Vargas Llosa’s literary texts and six paintings, by Jacob Jordaens, François Boucher, Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), Francis Bacon, Fernando de Szyszlo, and Fra Angélico. Novels that juxtapose the written text with painting invite the reader to function as observer. In this novel, the reader-observer discovers that each of the fourteen chapters has something to do with the six paintings, directly or indirectly.

Elogio de la madrastra deals with a triangular relationship among Rigoberto, his second wife, Lucrecia, and his son from his first marriage, Alfonso. The anecdotes involve an entire repertoire of material for psycho analysis: incest, pedophilia, voyeurism, fetishism, and certain fixations. The reader observes the gradual development of an incestuous relationship between Lucrecia the stepmother and the adolescent Alfonso. In the first chapter, Rigoberto seduces Lucrecia and at the end of the chapter, after they have sex, he calls her the wife of the king of Lydia, an allusion to the painting by Jordaens illustrated after the chapter. In this chapter the first suggestions of the incestuous relationship also appear, with touching and supposedly innocent kissing that, in fact, has incestuous resonances.

If the author’s challenge in El hablador was the creation of a convincing narrator-storyteller, his task is more complex in this narrative tour de force: now he assumes the voice of multiple unlikely narrators. Thus, the second chapter, like the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, and the twelfth, is narrated by a character from one of the paintings. Candaules, the king of Lydia (or perhaps Rigoberto, with the voice of Candaules), narrates his sexual fantasies, his sexual acts, and his voyeurism. When he describes his sexual relationship, he uses traditional metaphors. But this king is only capable of enjoying maximum sexual pleasure when there is a third person on the scene; at the end of the chapter the king arranges for Giges to observe him and Lucrecia having sex, setting forth the voyeurism that the adolescent boy, Alfonso, will practice. In the fifth chapter the Lucrecia from a painting narrates her erotic life. The seventh chapter is narrated by Amor, a character from a painting, who claims that she is a pagan little god. Here, once again, the young boy Fonchito is mentioned. In the ninth chapter, the narrator is the monstrous being of Bacon’s painting Cabeza I. A voice from de Szyszlo’s painting narrates the twelfth chapter. The fourteenth chapter is narrated by María from the painting La Anunciación.

After the first chapter, the plot and the triangular relationship among Rigoberto, Lucrecia, and Alfonso are developed in chapters 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, and 14. The third chapter establishes the vital sexual relationship between Rigoberto and Lucrecia, thus eliminating the interpretation of the incest as a search for an escape from a frustrating or unacceptable sexual relationship. In the fourth chapter, Lucrecia makes attempts to reject the child’s sexual advances, but in the end she performs in an erotic manner in the bathroom, knowing that the child is watching her. Upon going to bed that night, she has sexual fantasies associated with both the child and Rigoberto’s paintings. In the sixth chapter Rigoberto carries out all his physical rituals to protect himself against the “deterioration” of aging, setting forth that theme. In the eighth chapter the narrator develops the incest openly, with the stepmother kissing the boy Alfonso. Now the child is the “monster,” and is followed by the painting of the same topic. The contrast between chapters 11 and 12 is noteworthy: in the tenth we see Rigoberto’s sexual fantasies, and in eleventh the stepmother finally consummates her sexual relationship with the boy. In chapter 13, the boy tells Rigoberto of his relationship with his stepmother. In the epilogue, Rigoberto and Lucrecia have separated; the boy Alfonso dedicates himself to seducing the maid. With the prohibition of Lucrecia from the home, the patriarchal order is reestablished.

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Upon entering the political scene full-time in Peru, the world-class writer faced at least two daily challenges. First, he faced an intellectual challenge: how does a modernist writer not lose his sense of literary language and the subtleties of expression when he is required to simplify his language for the mass consumption of a population that is largely semi-literate or illiterate? Second, he had to manage to avoid intellectual asphyxiation while dealing with the grind of politics and his new daily routine. Vargas Llosa used various strategies to deal with these challenges. One was to regularly read, as a discipline, writers with hermetic literary language, from Góngora to Karl Popper. In January 1990, in fact, he sent an article to the prestigious North American academic journal PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) on Karl Popper. At the same time that Vargas Llosa was defending himself from attacks by Alan García, the APRA, and the Shining Path, he wrote introductory essays on writers such as Joyce (November 1987), Faulkner (December 1987), Boll (January 1988), Fitzgerald (March 1988), Camus (June 1988), Mann (September 1988), Lessing (November 1988), Pasternak (February 1989), Dos Passos (May 1989), Woolf (July 1989), and Steinbeck (September 1989), among others. In March 1990, a few weeks before the first round of elections in Peru, Vargas Llosa organized an international conference on “The Freedom Revolution,” hosting such figures as the French intellectual Jean-François Revel, the Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, and the Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo. For Vargas Llosa, this symposium was a breath of fresh air.

During this period of intense political life, security issues surfaced in a variety of ways, including regular anonymous death threats. In January 1989 Vargas Llosa barely escaped unharmed when a guerrilla group left dynamite on the landing strip at the airport of the town of Pucallpa. Several other plots were discovered by security agents during the process of the campaign. Despite these death threats, Vargas Llosa obviously survived his foray into the real politics of Peru. Perhaps the biggest single event of this adventuresome year took place in March 1990, when Vargas Llosa decided to attend a funeral for a political cohort in the heart of a region (Ayacucho) under the control of the Shining Path, an act of great symbolic importance.

The demands of the political campaign meant the suspension of many of his jogging mornings, and regular meetings of his “kitchen cabinet” of advisors, a group that included Frederick Cooper, Luis Bustamante, Raúl Salazar, Felipe Thorndike, Pedro Cateriano, Miguel Vega Alvear, and two key members of his family, Patricia and Álvaro. To the greatest extent possible, other than the meetings with his kitchen cabinet, Vargas Llosa attempted to reserve mornings for his intellectual work, leaving afternoons and evenings for politics.

On June 4, 1989, Vargas Llosa traveled to Arequipa, where he had been born some fifty-three years before, and there in southern Peru he officially announced his candidacy for the presidency of the nation, formally launching his campaign for the election to take place in April 1990. As is evident, Vargas Llosa’s political life extended back to the 1950s, and to certain members of his family, as far back as his grandfather Pedro Llosa. Thus, as surprising as his announcement might have been, given his career as a novelist, in the context of Peruvian politics it should not have been that surprising at all. The announcement was also consistent with the Vargas line of the family, which had always been adventurers; running for the presidency was, indeed, one of the most bold adventures of his life up until the age of fifty-three.

Vargas Llosa’s politics have been controversial since the late 1960s, when he first began questioning the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. His political vision and statements became even more controversial in the late 1980s, deriving from his readings of Hayek, Berlin, Friedman, and Popper earlier in the decade. The political program of his Movimiento Libertad and Frente Democrático was built around what Vargas Llosa called “la cultura de la libertad” (“the culture of freedom”). He found inspiration in the changes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was also inspired by the general trend toward privatization in Europe and the Americas. In Mexico, President Salinas had sold many of the largest state-owned companies, such as the copper mining industry, to private industry. Argentina was selling many of its state-owned companies; Chile had a free-market economy oriented toward exportation. For Vargas Llosa, this wave of privatization was a symbol of modernization, as opposed to the long tradition of statism in Peru. The idea of his coalition of the Democratic Front in Peru was to carry out a revolution of a classical liberal nature, with emphasis on economic freedom and in opposition to the strong tradition of state power in Peru. His coalition also emphasized the importance of individual entrepreneurship as opposed to dependence on the state.

Vargas Llosa dedicated himself to his presidential race as seriously and intensely as he had in many of his most ambitious literary projects. His full-fledged campaign actually began in September 1989, when he organized his professional team and set the goal of winning the election in the first round in April 1990. His group faced many difficulties, however, the primary one being the fact that the mass media was mostly under the direct or indirect control of the government. The local and international press tended to identify Vargas Llosa as “right wing” or of the “extreme right,” categories that the Peruvian clearly rejected.

Despite these disadvantages, Vargas Llosa was in the lead, according to the polls, during the entire year and a half of his campaign. Against the advice of his professional team, Vargas Llosa insisted on operating his campaign on the basis of his principles and his proposals for Peru. His team recommended more emphasis on image and attacking the opposition; Vargas Llosa insisted on substance. The opposition, on the other hand, used television to read erotic passages from his recent novel El elogio de la madrastra as a way of questioning the moral principles of the candidate. Nevertheless, the surveys placed Vargas Llosa with 45 percent of the populace, while each of the opposing candidates had a maximum of 20 percent.

In December 1989 Vargas Llosa presented his government platform at an annual conference of Peru’s business executives. Never before in the history of Peru had a presidential candidate presented as transparently a plan for such radical change. The plans included the privatization of much of the state-owned industry, the end of many of the privileges of the wealthy, the mobilization of the citizenry under the leadership of the president against guerrilla groups, a radical reform of public education, and a general reduction of the state bureaucracy. The opposition successfully described Vargas Llosa’s plan as a “shock” treatment that sounded alarmingly threatening, and the result was a continual loss of support, as evidenced in the last polls. As the campaign lost momentum, an unknown candidate, Alberto Fujimori, surfaced and successfully portrayed himself as opposed to the established order, and to a Vargas Llosa supposedly representing the old order. In the first round of the elections of April 8, 1990, Vargas Llosa won only 35 percent, while 30 percent voted for Fujimori.

Without the support of a strong majority of the populace, Vargas Llosa expressed his intention to resign as a candidate. In the end, however, he did follow through with the last round of the presidential election, subjecting himself to public defamation of character that included, for example, a minister of education declaring in the newspaper that Vargas Llosa was a drug addict. Fujimori won the election on June 10, 1990, and within a few hours Vargas Llosa was on a plane to Europe, visiting Paris and Madrid before returning to London.

Once settled in London, Vargas Llosa returned to two pending projects, both of which were part of his work in 1991. For some time, he had been taking notes for a book on Hugo’s Les Misérables, and he continued reading and taking notes for this critical study throughout the 1990s. His other project was the next novel, a continuation in terms of stories, scenarios, and characters from La casa verde and ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? By 1991, he and Patricia were once again on the academic lecture circuit in the United States, and he accepted a visiting professorship at Florida International University.

THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY WRITER AND THE NOBEL PRIZE (1992–2010)

The twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa has been a citizen of the world, thus living the cosmopolitan dream of many Latin American writers of his generation. His international interests have ranged from a Peruvian author, Arguedas, about whom he published a lengthy book, to Iraq, about which he published a short book.69 He has explored all the classic genres of literature—prose fiction, theater, poetry, essay—during this period. Not only intensely involved with the polemics of Latin American literature and politics, as he has been his entire adult life, he has also participated in the European dialogue, perhaps one of several reasons that this period culminated in his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Since 1992, however, he has been exceptionally disciplined, producing some six novels, essays, a play, and three book-length scholarly studies, one on José María Arguedas, another on Victor Hugo, and another on Juan Carlos Onetti. In the 1970s and 1980s he had lived between London and Lima; in the twenty first-century, he took up residency in Madrid and traveled to Lima in the South American summer months, typically spending December through March in Peru.

Vargas Llosa received a fellowship to dedicate himself to his writing in Berlin in late 1991 and the first half of 1992. Among his numerous projects—the study of Hugo, the next novel, and a partial autobiography—he made considerable progress on both the novel and the autobiography. In the second half of 1992 Vargas Llosa took up residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he taught a comparative literature course at Harvard University. The next semester (from January to May 1993) he taught a course on fantastic literature in Latin America at Princeton University while he continued work on the novel project.

In 1993 two of his recent projects appeared as books, the partial autobiography under the title El pez en el agua (A Fish in Water) and the novel under the title Lituma en los Andes (Lituma in the Andes). In the former, Vargas Llosa offers the most detailed extant account of his childhood, as well as an equally detailed description of his campaign for the presidency of Peru. This narrative offers considerable insight into these two periods of Vargas Llosa’s life—avoiding the problematic anecdotes about his relationship with writers, intellectuals, and political leaders during the 1960s and 1970s, most of whom were still alive when this book appeared in print.

In Lituma en los Andes, Vargas Llosa returns to his character Lituma, who had appeared originally in La casa verde and then again in ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? More significant, however, is the writer’s return to a topic that has haunted him since the 1980s—armed guerrilla insurrection and the Shining Path. As had increasingly been the case in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, the events in this novel seem to transpire inexplicably. As Efraín Kristal has pointed out correctly, the violence in this novel occurs without any rational explanation.70 The Shining Path is in control of the region where Lituma is assigned to a military outpost. There, he and two other military soldiers are assigned to investigate the deaths of three people in complex and shadowy circumstances. Another narrative line deals with the sexual fantasies of one of Lituma’s sidekicks. This first novel of Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century work, interestingly, is his last reflection on the guerrilla warfare of the twentieth century. In several ways, his twenty-first-century works tend to be reflections on the previous century (see part II).

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The stark political realities of everyday politics in Peru during the political campaign of 1990 laid the groundwork for what might be identified as the third stage of Vargas Llosa’s intellectual career, his anti-utopian period. In the twenty-first century, utopianism per se became a topic of his writing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the second period in his writing career, Vargas Llosa had become progressively more disillusioned with his leftist and sometimes utopian political agenda. Even during the 1960s there had been some signs that Vargas Llosa might not remain with the Left. In 1964, when his idol Jean-Paul Sartre declared that African writers should abandon their pens to fight hunger, Vargas Llosa felt betrayed. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Peruvian writer had rejected Sartre, rejected the armed violence of the idealist and utopian guerrilla movements in both Peru and throughout Latin America, and rejected a portion of the political agenda of much of the traditional Left in Latin America.

Vargas Llosa’s three key works with respect to utopianism are his essay on José María Arguedas titled La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo (1996, untranslated, The archaic utopia) and the novels El paraíso en la otra esquina, and El sueño del celta. La utopía arcaica is his scholarly study of the Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas and el indigenismo in Peru, beginning with an historical overview of the concept of indigenismo in Mexico. In this admirably researched scholarly study, Vargas Llosa walks a thin line. On the one hand, he exhibits admiration for Arguedas, a writer who spent a lifetime struggling to survive as a novelist in Peru; Vargas Llosa has often written of these difficulties for Peruvian writers, and does indeed sympathize with those Peruvians who have made the decision to pursue careers as writers. On the other, Arguedas is a writer dedicated to the indigenista project, and Vargas Llosa is, in the end, deeply skeptical and stridently critical of this movement, which had peaked in the 1930s and 1940s and which Vargas Llosa demonstrates was implicitly racist in conceptualization. In reviewing the academic studies of indigenismo, Vargas Llosa explains how the political and literary versions of indigenismo were fading in the 1960s, when the symbol of the indigenous past shifted from the Inca Garcilaso to Guaman Poma de Ayala. The latter insisted on maintaining pureza de la sangre (pure blood), and rejected the idea of intermarriage between the Spaniards and the indigenous groups. Messianic groups, such as the Taki Onqoy, attempted to reject cultural and religious acculturation, and returned to what would become, with time, a tradition of utopía arcaica.

Vargas Llosa describes the utopía arcaica as “la restauración de un pasado míticamente embellecido con elementos asimilados de la cultura ‘dominante’ y la fantasía creadora de los escritores y artistas.”71 This is the case of Arguedas, in his fictional world, which is based to a great extent on the myths of the “utopía arcaica.” His idea of Arguedas’s indigenismo is that it is “una rica ficción” (“a rich fiction”) that has its roots in its pre-Hispanic past. For Vargas Llosa, indigenismo in general, and the fiction of Arguedas in particular, are based on these outdated or “archaic” utopias (La utopía, 273). In the conclusion of his book on utopia and Arguedas, he claims that this vision is now dead in the twenty-first century: what is undeniable is that traditional Andean society—communitarian, magic-realist, Quechua speaking, conservative in its collectivist values—a society that fed the literary fiction of indigenismo, no longer exists (La utopía, 335).

Peruvian reality of the twenty-first century, according to Vargas Llosa, has little or nothing to do with the utopian fiction of the utopía arcaica, for Peru is not that old Peru envisioned as the “Hispanic Peru” (Perú hispanista), nor indio (Indian), nor blanco (white), nor indigenista, and Vargas Llosa’s final conclusion is that modern Peru is not the one fabulado, or fictionalized, by Arguedas. Writers in Peru who believed in the utopía arcaica, from Guaman Poma de Ayala to José María Arguedas, spent centuries, concludes Vargas Llosa, constructing a sueño, a dream.

All in all, this critical study is an important early statement of the twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa on utopian thought, for he has established a continuous line of utopian thinking in Peru from the Colonial period to the mid-twentieth century. Eight years later, in 2004, Vargas Llosa finally came forth with his critical study of Hugo and Les Misérables (a book he had been planning for over a decade) under the title La tentación de lo imposible: Víctor Hugo y Los Miserables. His focus in this book is not utopian thought. Nevertheless, in his conclusion, in the book’s very last paragraph, he does refer to Victor Hugo’s “visión utópica,” the utopian vision that leads this French writer to believe that humanity was advancing toward justice, liberty, and peace.

The most lengthy and thorough novelistic consideration of utopian thought by this twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa is the novel El paraíso en la otra esquina. As Fernando La Fuente has pointed out, the two main characters, Flora Tristán and Paul Gauguin, represent the two Arcadias fictionalized in the novel, two broad lines of utopian thought that date back to the nineteenth century.72 One line grows out of the Enlightenment and arose with the French Revolution and the promise of progress through industrialization and modernization, accompanied by principles of justice, liberty, and equality. This line of utopian thought is embodied in the fictional character of Flora Tristán (1801–1844), who expounds her ideas in L’Union ouvrière and shares with Charles Fourier a utopian desire to transform the individual and society from its roots, to create a harmonious society in which not only would exploitation and poverty end, but also justice would reign.

The second general line of utopian thought in the novel is fictionalized in the character of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903); this is a form of mystical, rural, primitive thinking that circulated in late nineteenth-century Europe. Gauguin’s version of these ideas involves rejecting his bourgeois life as a stockbroker, becoming an artist, and seeking the Utopia of what he views as the ideal of the authentically primitive. Early in his career as an artist, as novelized by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gauguin searches briefly for inspiration in the authentically rural Brittany. His discovery of Tahiti, however, provides his ultimate utopia, which for him is the ultimate rejection of bourgeois values as well as a route to a real and authentic art: the sexual body. Gauguin conceptualizes the bodies of his adolescent lovers as the inspiration for his new art. Thus, his utopia in Tahiti is, in reality, a somewhat Romanticized version of a communion with nature as the body, and original, authentic art as a product of Romantic inspiration.

Gauguin’s distancing from decadent late nineteenth-century Europe is the opposite of Flora Tristán’s relationship with society, for she actively seeks interaction with the groups and individuals that she firmly believes she will reform with her ideas. Her early to mid-nineteenth-century campaign for workers’ rights and equality for women placed her in direct contact with a broad spectrum of French society. For her, unlike Gauguin, the sexual body offers no ideal, as she basically rejects her own sexual body after divorcing her husband, with the exception of one brief lesbian encounter. For Flora, the vehicle for reaching utopia is not sexual interaction, but her tireless campaign and her publication, L’Union ouvrière, which she distributes with obstinate dedication.

Thus, whereas the fictionalized Paul Gauguin embodies much of what is a late nineteenth-century Romanticism combined with tardy Darwinism, Flora is a product of Enlightenment ideas, a woman driven by concepts to which she is fully and slavishly committed. She is seemingly unaware, throughout her political campaigns and travels, that relatively few of her interlocutors are interested in her ideas, and most of those with whom she interacts—workers or fellow utopians—are either indifferent or openly opposed to her radical plans for transforming French society. In this sense, she shares with Gauguin an isolation on her own self-constructed metaphorical utopian island: in his case it is a physical island of sexual desire and inspired creativity, and in hers it is one of Enlightenment ideas. Gauguin writes political diatribes against the modernization of Tahiti, but dies relatively unaffected by political reality. Flora does face one defeat after another, as she moves from town to town in France, and thus fails to effect change toward a more utopian or even slightly more just French society. She is generally rejected by the bourgeois establishment, by other utopian leaders, and even by the workers.

In El paraíso en la otra esquina, Vargas Llosa presents two characters with whom he seems to sympathize as human beings struggling to live in their respective utopias in light of the real realities each faces: Gauguin’s body degenerates via syphilis; Gauguin is first unable to accept living in the world of a traditional marriage and high finance, and then spends his later years, as an artist, dying of venereal disease. Flora also finds a traditional marriage as unbearable as the limited rights of women and workers. Their respective missions as artist and political activist have many admirable qualities. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel Gauguin is unable to function in society and seemingly insane; Flora Tristán is so innocent in judging her fellow human beings that she is politically unviable, ineffective.

The work that appeared after El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, is a twenty-first-century love story that, on the surface, would seem to add little to the topic of utopianism and political reality in Vargas Llosa’s recent fiction. It is the sixth of Vargas Llosa’s entertainments. It tells the story of an aging Peruvian, Ricardo Somocurcio, who is living a modest existence in Paris as a translator and is deeply in love with a much younger Peruvian woman whose only interest in men, including him, is to exploit them for her own sexual and monetary benefit. In his early years in Paris, in the 1960s, the then-young Peruvian meets with his friends from Peru who were involved with armed guerrilla movements in their home country. The protagonist sympathizes with the individuals who visit him in Paris, and one of them even claims that, once the revolution triumphs in Peru, their contact in Paris will become their ambassador in France. Living in Paris, however, the protagonist is relatively passive in his support of these individuals as friends, and actually contributes nothing to the revolutionary cause in Peru. His real interests are surviving in Paris as a translator and his true obsession, the bad girl with whom he is in love. His revolutionary friends, most of whom end up dead or incarcerated, are presented in the novel as admirable in their utopian ideals, but pathetic in their political acumen and efficacy. By midway in the novel, these minor characters are abandoned.

Vargas Llosa’s most recent novel and perhaps the centerpiece of his twenty-first-century writing, El sueño del celta, is the most elaborate of his twenty-first-century rethinking of utopian thought and is his fictionalized version of the life of the British diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger Casement. The first part of the novel deals with Casement’s experience in the Belgian Congo, where he observes widespread abuse of African slaves, and eventually writes reports on this exceptionally cruel exploitation, which is related to the rubber industry in Africa. In this part of his life Casement is seen as a model citizen of the Enlightenment, in which European reason, as exercised by him, corrects the misuse of reason by the European colonizers. Highly esteemed by the British government after his conscientious work in Africa, Casement receives another government appointment, now to investigate claims of similar abuse of indigenous peoples, but in the upper Amazonian region of Peru and Ecuador. This is the setting for the second part of El sueño del celta. At this stage, the figure of Roger Casement is the renowned diplomat whose very presence in the Amazon constitutes a political threat for the local broker, the owner of a Peruvian rubber company, the real historical figure of César Arana, who dies penniless. In both of these first two parts, there are brief scenes describing the sexual fantasies of Casement and possible encounters with physically attractive males.

By the third part of the novel, Casement has become an Irish nationalist and activist in ways comparable to idealists and utopians of a lineage of interest to Vargas Llosa: this line of characters includes José María Arguedas, Flora Tristán, Paul Gauguin, and the Peruvian armed guerrillas of the 1960s (and Vargas Llosa himself in Caracas in 1967). In the third part of El sueño del celta, Casement is based in Europe; the time period is World War I. In his extreme dedication to a utopian nationalist cause, Casement establishes contact with the German government and offers a plan to recruit Irish soldiers from among the prisoners of war held by the Germans in order to create a special Irish battalion, supported by the Germans, to attack England. The realpolitik of this extravagant plan, however, is distant from the political reality of war and the postwar period. Casement’s strategy with the Germans fails, he is accused of treason, and he is eventually executed. By the time he is executed, the British government has successfully ruined his reputation by publicizing his personal diaries. These diaries contain claims of sexual encounters with adolescent boys; some historians believe the diaries to have been falsified by the British government in order to ruin Casement’s reputation. Casement is the last of Vargas Llosa’s failed utopians.

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As a citizen of the world, as well as an ex-candidate for the presidency of Peru, Vargas Llosa found it necessary, facing threats from President-elect Fujimori, to become a citizen of Spain in 1993. Since then he has held dual citizenship. He has become a member of that prestigious Spanish institution, the Real Academia Española de la Lengua. In Madrid, he is known not only as the Peruvian-Spanish author of over fifteen books, but as the thinker who often publishes editorials, usually on topics of political interest related to the defense of human rights and freedom of the press, in El País; as the avid fan of bullfights; and as the equally enthusiastic follower of fútbol—European and Latin American professional soccer.

The Vargas Llosas spent several months in 1994 in Washington, DC, while Mario taught a course at Georgetown University on Julio Cortázar’s short stories; by the mid-1990s they found themselves increasingly attracted to Spain, and eventually took up residence in central Madrid, where Vargas Llosa has been able to organize his life exactly as it has functioned best for him: writing in the early morning, walking and then writing again late in the morning until mid-afternoon; reading and self-editing in the afternoon, often in nearby cafés; and enjoying cultural and social life in the evening. During this period—the mid- to late 1990s—he accepted frequent invitations to participate in academic symposia in European universities—many of them in France—most of which have been centered on his work. His most recent return to an early and lifelong interest—theater—was manifest once again in 2008 by his not only writing yet another play, Las mil y una noches, but also performing in it in several cities.

In 1997 Vargas Llosa published his thirteenth novel, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), a continuation of Elogio de la madrastra, for this novel contains the same group of characters and further explores the same topics. This is the fifth of his six entertainments, along with Elogio de la madrastra, Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La tía Julia y el escribidor, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, and the later Travesuras de la niña mala. This novel returns to the triangular relationship among Lucrecia, Rigoberto, and the child Alfonso (who once again appears with his nickname, “Fonchito”). The young boy manages to establish contact with Lucrecia, despite her efforts to maintain distance. Later, using anonymous letters, the boy manages to manipulate the relationship between Lucrecia and Rigoberto.

As in Elogio de la madrastra, the novel’s dynamism is based on literary play similar to the games in La tía Julia y el escribidor. The reader has access to Rigoberto’s texts, revealing his sexual fantasies. On the one hand, the reader is entertained by the details of his sexual fantasies, particularly because of his rigidity, which reaches humorous proportions, recalling much of the personality of characters such as Pantaleón Pantoja and Pedro Camacho. On the other hand, many of these personality quirks (such as the rigidity) are just exaggerated versions of Vargas Llosa’s own personality, creating another level of reading, or self-parody.

Several of Vargas Llosa’s ongoing interests appear in this novel, including the issue of individual freedom in the context of the good of society at large. In this case, Rigoberto is the character in favor of absolute individual freedom. Once again, as in several previous novels, Vargas Llosa presents an obsessive personality. As in Elogio de la madrastra, the characters do not act according to any “human nature.” Rather, their actions have their source in art—paintings and texts to which Rigoberto has access. In yet another level of parody, Rigoberto writes comments about the Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti, the same author about whom Vargas Llosa has written articles and eventually, a book.73

In the late 1990s, Vargas Llosa engaged himself in research and travel related to the life of the former dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. A few weeks after the publication of La fiesta del Chivo, Vargas Llosa declared that the true history of humanity is not the history of democracy, but of figures such as Trujillo. Within a year of having completed the novel, he was interviewing citizens whose descriptions of their fallen dictator, Saddam Hussein, were remarkably similar to what citizens of the Dominican Republic had told Vargas Llosa about Trujillo. In the early 1990s, Vargas Llosa had scandalized the Mexican political establishment with his declaration that the old PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), still in power at the time under a very thin guise of democracy, was la dictadura perfecta—the perfect dictatorship.74 In contrast, the Trujillo dictatorship would be better described as “imperfect”—an overtly abusive and violent exercise of brute power with no pretense of democracy—until the dictator was finally assassinated in 1961. The reader sees Trujillo as the prototypical military figure in his best years, and then, with aging, as a decrepit sexual abuser. Covering several decades, the novel shows how the dictator maintains power and abuses power using many of the same strategies seen in military figures of Conversación en La Catedral, as well as other modern Latin American literary classics in the genre of the dictator novel, such as El recurso del método (1975, Reasons of State) by Alejo Carpentier and García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch). The major portion of the action in La fiesta del Chivo, however, takes place in 1961, as the assassination plot is described, piece by piece.

With respect to the empirical reality related to the perverse political and sexual events in the novel, Vargas Llosa explained in an interview, correctly, “No inventé nada que no hubiera podido ocurrir” (“I did not invent anything that could not have happened”).⁷⁵ Indeed, Vargas Llosa knew the real Trujillo regime well, for his research in the late 1990s was the final complement to a dictatorship that the Peruvian first began to learn about in 1975 during his stay of several months in the Dominican Republic to make a film version of Pantaleón y las visitadoras; during this visit, his introduction to Trujillo consisted of anecdotes he heard verbally while on the island and the reading of a few books on Trujillo. On this and other trips to the island, Vargas Llosa learned much of the popular mythology about Trujillo, and the character that he created in the novel contained much of the popular myth, some of the historical figure, and, of course, the author’s own invention, based on these two sources.

Upon publishing this work, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers of his five “entertainments” that he was still, also, the writer with a lifelong commitment to questioning the abuse of power in the format of lengthy works that seemingly aspired to be those “total” novels.

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On a rainy Sunday morning in early December 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa, Patricia, and an entourage of family and close friends boarded a flight from Madrid to Sweden. It was an adventure of even larger proportions than Ernesto Vargas’s audacious trip from Peru to Buenos Aires in the 1930s: this twenty-first-century Vargas’s adventure was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm. The intellectual centerpiece of the week was Vargas Llosa’s Nobel speech on Tuesday, “Elogio de la Lectura y la Ficción” (“In Praise of Reading and Fiction”), in which he addressed the Europeans’ failure (as well as the failure of the colonizing white and elite oligarchies) to deal fairly and appropriately with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He also recognized his debts among writers, highlighting once again, above all, his masters Flaubert and Faulkner. The overall tone of the Nobel acceptance speech was one of gratitude.

At the end of his week in Stockholm, he gave the official toast at the ceremonial dinner in which each of the Nobel laureates actually received the prize. In this speech, Vargas Llosa invented his own version of a fairy tale, retelling his own incredible adventure story—his life story—as a childhood fable.76