Vargas Llosa, Mario 1936–
Vargas Llosa, Mario 1936–
(Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa)
PERSONAL:
Born March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, Peru; became Spanish citizen, 1994; son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonaldo and Dora Llosa Ureta; married Julia Urquidi, 1955 (divorced); married Patricia Llosa, 1965; children: (second marriage) Alvaro, Gonzalo, Morgana. Education: Attended University of San Marcos, 1953-57; University of Madrid, Ph.D., 1959. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Agnostic. Hobbies and other interests: Films, jogging, football.
ADDRESSES:
Agent—Algaguara, Torrelaguna, 60, 28043 Madrid, Spain.
CAREER:
Writer and journalist. Journalist with La Industria, Piura, Peru, and with Radio Panamericana and La Cronica, both in Lima, Peru, c. 1950s; worked in Paris, France, as a journalist with Agence France-Presse, as a broadcaster with the radio-television network L'Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF), and as a language teacher; Queen Mary College and Kings College, London, England, faculty member, 1966-68; Washington State University, Seattle, writer-in-residence, 1968; University of Puerto Rico, visiting professor, 1969; Libre, Paris, cofounder, 1971; Columbia University, New York, NY, Edward Laroque Tinker Visiting Professor, 1975; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Robert Kennedy Professor, beginning 1992. Former fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC; former host of Peruvian television program The Tower of Babel; Peruvian presidential candidate, Liberty Movement, 1989-90.
MEMBER:
PEN (president 1976-79), Academy Peruana de la Lengua, Modern Language Association of America (honorary fellow), American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (honorary member).
AWARDS, HONORS:
Prize of the Revue Française, 1957, for The Challenge; Premio Leopoldo Alas, 1959, for Los jefes; Premio Biblioteca Breve, 1962, for La ciudad y los perros; Premio de la Critica Española, 1963, for La ciudad y los perros; Premio de la Critica Española, 1967, for La casa verde; Premio Nacional de la Novela, Peru, and Premio Internacional Literatura Romulo Gallegos, both 1967, both for La casa verde; annual prize for theater (Argentina), 1981; Congressional Medal of Honor, Peruvian government, 1981; Instituto Italo Latinoamericano Iila prize (Italy), 1982, for La tia Julia y el escribidor; Ritz Paris Hemingway Award, 1985, for The War of the End of the World; Legion of Honor, France, 1985; Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, 1986; Scanno Prize, Rizzoli Libri (Italy), 1989; Castiglione Prize of Sicily, 1990; Legion of Freedom, the Cultural Institute Ludwig von Mises, Mexico, 1990; T.S. Eliot Prize, Ingersoll Foundation, the Rockford Institute, 1991, for creative writing; Golden Palm Award of INTAR, Hispanic American Arts Center of New York, 1992; named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1993; Miguel de Cervantes prize for literature, Ministry of Culture, Spain, 1994; Jerusalem prize, 1995; Prize of La Paz, Booksellers of Germany, 1996; Prize Mariano de Cavia, 1997; Golden PEN Award, PEN Executive Committee, 1997; Medal and Diploma of Honor, Catholic University of Santa Maria of Arequipa, Peru, 1997; National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, 1997, for Making Waves; Medal from the University of California, Los Angeles, 1999; Jorge Isaacs Prize, 1999; Prize Américas, Foundation of the Américas, 2000-01; Gold Medal, city of Genoa, Italy, 2002; Nabokov Prize, PEN American Center, 2002; Medal of Honor, Peruvian Congress, 2003; Prize Roger Caillos, Paris, France, 2003; Prize Budapest, Budapest, Hungary, 2003; Konex Prize, Konex Foundation, 2004; American Enterprise Institute award, 2005. Honorary degrees from Florida International University, Miami, FL, 1990; Dowling College, 1993; University Francisco Marroquiín, 1993; Georgetown University, 1994; Yale University, 1994; University of Rennes II, 1994; University of Murcia, Spain, 1995; University of Valladolid, Spain, 1995; University of Lima, Peru, 1997; and Harvard University, 1999; also D.H.L., Connecticut College, 1991, and honorary doctorates from Boston University and University of Genoa, Italy, both 1992.
WRITINGS:
NOVELS
La ciudad y los perros, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1963, translation by Lysander Kemp published as The Time of the Hero, Grove (New York, NY), 1966, 2nd edition, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1999.
La casa verde, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1966, translation by Gregory Rabassa published as The Green House, Harper (New York, NY), 1968, reprinted, Rayo (New York, NY), 2005.
Conversacion en la catedral, two volumes, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1969, translation by Gregory Rabassa published as Conversation in the Cathedral, Harper (New York, NY), 1975, reprinted, Rayo (New York, NY), 2005.
Pantaleon y las visitadoras, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1973, translation by Ronald Christ and Gregory Kolovakos published as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Harper (New York, NY), 1978.
La tia Julia y el escribidor, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1977, translation by Helen Lane published as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1982.
La guerra del fin del mundo, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1981, translation by Helen Lane published as The War of the End of the World, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1984.
Historia de Mayta, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1985, translation by Alfred MacAdam published as The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1986.
Quien mato a Palomino Molero?, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1986, translation by Alfred MacAdam published as Who Killed Palomino Molero?, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1987.
El hablador, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1987, translation by Helen Lane published as The Storyteller, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1989.
Elogio de la madrastra, Tusquets (Barcelona, Spain), 1988, translation by Helen Lane published as In Praise of the Stepmother, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1990.
Lituma en los Andes, Planeta (Barcelona, Spain), 1993, translation by Edith Grossman published as Death in the Andes, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1996.
Travesuras de la niña mala, Alfaguara (Santiago de Surco, Lima, Peru), 2006, translation by Edith Grossman published as The Bad Girl, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2007.
OTHER FICTION
Los jefes (story collection; title means "The Leaders" also see below), Rocas (Barcelona, Spain), 1959, translation by Ronald Christ and Gregory Kolovakos published in The Cubs and Other Stories, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.
Los cachorros (novella; title means "The Cubs"; also see below), Lumen (Barcelona, Spain), 1967.
Los cachorros; Los jefes, Peisa (Lima, Peru), 1973.
Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1997, translation by Edith Grossman published as The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1998.
Obra reunida: Narrativa breve (short stories), Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1999.
La fiesta del chivo, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 2000, translation by Edith Grossman published as The Feast of the Goat, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2002.
El paraíso en la otra esquina, Alfaguara (Lima, Peru), 2003, translation by Natasha Wimmer published as The Way to Paradise, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.
PLAYS
La senorita de Tacna (produced as Senorita from Tacna in New York, NY, 1983; produced as The Young Lady from Tacna in Los Angeles, CA, 1985), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1981, translation by David Graham-Young published as The Young Lady from Tacna in Mario Vargas Llosa: Three Plays (also see below), 1990.
Kathie y el hipopotamo: Comedia en dos actos (translation by Kerry McKenny and Anthony Oliver-Smith produced as Kathie and the Hippopotamus in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1986), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1983, translation by David Graham-Young published in Mario Vargas Llosa: Three Plays (also see below), 1990.
La chunga (translation by Joanne Pottlitzer first produced in New York, NY, 1986), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1986, translation by David Graham-Young published in Mario Vargas Llosa: Three Plays (also see below), 1990.
Mario Vargas Llosa: Three Plays (contains The Young Lady from Tacna, Kathie and the Hippopotamus, and La chunga), Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1990.
El señor de los balcones (title means "Lord of the Balconies"), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1993.
Teatro: Obra Reunida, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 2006.
Odiseo y Penélope, Galaxia Gutenberg: Circulo de Lectores (Barcelona, Spain), 2007.
Also author of play Le Huida (title means "The Escape"), produced in Piura, Peru.
ESSAYS
La verdad de las mentiras (title means "The Truth of Lies"), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1990.
Making Waves, edited by and translation by John King, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1997.
Cartas a un joven novelista, Ariel/Planeta (Barcelona, Spain), 1997, translation by Natasha Wimmer published as Letters to a Young Novelist, Picador (New York, NY), 2003.
El lenguaje de la pasion, El Pais (Madrid, Spain), 2001, translation by Natasha Wimmer published as The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.
Ce cahier a été dirigé par Albert Bensoussan, Editions de l'Herne (Paris, France), 2003.
Escritos políticos y morales (Perú: 1954-1965), Fondo Editorial (Lima, Peru), 2003.
Ensayos literarios, Galaxia Gutenberg: Cìrculo de Lectores (Barcelona, Spain), 2005.
Touchstones: Essays on Literature, Art and Politics, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2007.
Wellsprings, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2007.
OTHER
La novela, Fundacion de Cultura Universitaria (Montevideo, Uruguay), 1968.
(With Gabriel García Márquez) La novela en America Latina, Milla Batres (Lima, Peru), 1968.
(Editor, with G. Brotherston) Seven Stories from Spanish America, Pergamon Press (Oxford, NY), 1968.
Antologia minima de M. Vargas Llosa, Tiempo Contemporaneo (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1969.
Letra de batalla per "Tirant lo Blanc," Edicions 62, 1969, published as Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanc, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1991.
(With Oscar Collazos and Julio Cortazar) Literatura en la revolucion y revolucion en la literatura, Siglo Veintiuno (Mexico City, Mexico), 1970.
Los cachorros; El desafio; Dia domingo, Salvat (Barcelona, Spain), 1970, Dia domingo published separately, Amadis (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1971.
García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (title means "García Márquez: The Story of a Deicide"), Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1971.
La historia secreta de una novela, Tusquets (Madrid, Spain), 1971.
(With Martin de Riquer) El combate imaginario: Las cartas de batalla de Joanot Martorell, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1972.
(With Angel Rama) García Márquez y la problematica de la novela, Corregidor-Marcha (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1973.
Obras escogidas: Novelas y cuentos, Aguilar (Madrid, Spain), 1973.
La orgia perpetua: Flaubert y "Madame Bovary," Taurus (Madrid, Spain), 1975, translation by Helen Lane published as The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and "Madame Bovary," Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1986.
Conversacion en la cathedral: La orgia Perpetua; Pantaleon y las visitadoras, Aguilar (Madrid, Spain), 1978.
Jose Maria Arguedas, entre sapos y halcones, Ediciones Cultura Hispanica del Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperacion (Madrid, Spain), 1978.
La utopia arcaica, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge (Cambridge, England), 1978.
The Genesis and Evolution of "Pantaleon y las visitadoras," City College (New York, NY), 1979.
Art, Authenticity, and Latin-American Culture, Wilson Center (Washington, DC), 1981.
Entre Sartre y Camus, Huracan (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico), 1981.
Contra viento y marea (journalism; title means "Against All Odds"), three volumes, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1983-90.
La cultura de la libertad, la libertad de la cultura, Fundacion Eduardo Frei (Santiago, Chile), 1985.
El debate, Universidad del Pacifico, Centro de Investigacion (Lima, Peru), 1990.
A Writer's Reality, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1991.
El pez en el agua: Memorias, Seix Barral (Barcelona, Spain), 1993, translation by Helen Lane published as A Fish in the Water: A Memoir, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1994.
Desafios a la libertad, Aguilar (Madrid, Spain), 1994.
Ojos bonitos, cuadros feos, Peisa (Lima, Peru), 1996.
Una historia no oficial, Espasa Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 1997.
(With Paul Bowles) Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, Abbeville Press (New York, NY), 1997.
(With others) Los desafios a la socieda abierta: A fines del siglo XX (title means "Challenges to the Open Society: At the End of the Twentieth Century"), Ameghino (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1999.
(Author of introduction) Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Carlos Alberto Montaner, Guide to the Perfect Latin-American Idiot, translation by Michaela Lajda Ames, Madison Books, distributed by National Book Network (Lanham, MD), 2000.
(Author of text) Pablo Corral Vega, Andes (photographs), National Geographic Society (Washington, DC), 2001.
Literatura y politica, Technical School of Monterrey (Monterrey, Mexico), 2001.
Palma, Valor nacional, Universidad Ricardo Palma (Lima, Peru), 2003.
(Author of text) Morgana Vargas Llosa, Diario de Irak (photographs), Aguilar (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 2003.
(Author of preface) Flora Tristan, Flora Tristan, la paria et son rêve: Correspondence, second revised edition, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France), 2003.
Entretien avec Mario Vargas Llosa; suivi de, Ma parente d'Arequipa: Nouvelle inédite (interviews), Terre de Brume (Rennes, France), 2003.
Las fotos del paraíso, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 2003.
Entrevistas escogidas: Selección (interviews), edited by Jorge Coaguila, Fondo Editorial Cultura Peruana (Lima, Peru), 2004.
Narraciones y novelas (1959-1967), Galaxia Gutenberg: Círculo de Lectores (Barcelona, Spain), 2004.
Obras completas, Galaxia Gutenberg: Cículo de Lectores (Barcelona, Spain), 2004.
(Author of text) Morgana Vargas Llosa, Israel, Palestina: Paz o guerra santa, Aguilar (Madrid, Spain), 2006.
La tentación de lo imposible: Victor Hugo y Los miserables, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 2004, translation by John King published as The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2007.
Contributor to The Eye of the Heart, 1973. Contributor to periodicals, including Commentary, Harper's, National Review, New Perspectives Quarterly, New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, UNESCO Courier, and World Press Review. Syndicated columnist, El País, 1977—.
ADAPTATIONS:
The Cubs was filmed in 1971; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service was filmed in 1976, directed by Vargas Llosa; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was adapted as a television series in Peru, as a screenplay written by William Boyd and directed by Jon Amiel in 1989, and as a motion picture titled Tunein Tomorrow, c. 1990; The Feast of the Goat was adapted for the stage by Veronia Triana and Jorge Ali Triana and directed by Jorge Ali Triana at the Gramercy Arts Theater, New York, NY, 2003. Selected works have been recorded by the Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature.
SIDELIGHTS:
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa often draws from his personal experiences to write of the injustices and corruption of contemporary Latin America. At one time an admirer of communist Cuba, since the early 1970s Vargas Llosa has been opposed to tyrannies of both the political left and right. He advocates democracy, a free market, and individual liberty and cautions against extreme or violent political action, instead calling for peaceful democratic reforms. In 1989 Vargas Llosa was chosen to be the presidential candidate of Fredemo, a political coalition in Peru; though at one point he held a large lead in election polls, in the end he lost the election to Alberto Fujimori. Through his novels, which are marked by complex structures and an innovative merging of dialogue and description in an attempt to recreate the actual feeling of life, Vargas Llosa has established himself as one of the most important of contemporary writers in the Spanish language.
As a young man, Vargas Llosa spent two years at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy. Sent there by his father, who had discovered that his son wrote poetry and was therefore fearful for the boy's masculinity, Vargas Llosa found the school insufferable and horrendous. His years at the school inspired his first novel, The Time of the Hero, originally published in Spanish as La ciudad y los perros. The novel's success was assured when the school's officials objected to Vargas Llosa's portrayal of their institution. The school went as far as to burn a thousand of copies of the book.
Vargas Llosa wrote The Time of the Hero after leaving Peru for Europe in 1958, when he was twenty-two. In embracing Europe and entering into self-imposed exile from his native land, he was following in the footsteps of numerous Latin-American writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Carlos Fuentes. Vargas Llosa was to stay in Europe for thirty years, not returning to Peru until the late 1980s after the country had slipped into political chaos and economic impoverishment. These conditions prompted Vargas Llosa's decision to seek the presidency of Peru. During his three decades in Europe, Vargas Llosa became an internationally celebrated author.
Though Vargas Llosa had attracted widespread attention with his first novel, it was his second that cemented his status as a major novelist. In the award-winning La casa verde (The Green House), the author draws upon another period from his childhood for inspiration. For several years his family lived in the Peruvian jungle town of Piura, and his memories of the gaudy local brothel, known to everyone as the Green House, form the basis of his novel. The book's several stories are interwoven in a nonlinear narrative revolving around the brothel and the family that owns it, the military that runs the town, a dealer in stolen rubber in the nearby jungle, and a prostitute who was raised in a convent. "Scenes overlap, different times and places overrun each other … echoes precede voices, and disembodied consciences dissolve almost before they can be identified," Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann wrote in Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. Gregory Rabassa, writing in World Literature Today, noted that the novel's title "is the connective theme that links the primitive world of the jungle to the primal lusts of ‘civilization’ which are enclosed by the green walls of the whorehouse." Rabassa saw, too, that Vargas Llosa's narrative style "has not reduced time to a device of measurement or location, a practical tool, but has conjoined it with space, so that the characters carry their space with them too … inseparable from their time." Harss and Dohmann found that The Green House "is probably the most accomplished work of fiction ever to come out of Latin America. It has sweep, beauty, imaginative scope, and a sustained eruptive power that carries the reader from first page to last like a fish in a bloodstream."
With Conversacion en la catedral, published in translation as Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa widens his scope. Whereas in previous novels he seeks to recreate the repression and corruption of a particular place, in Conversation in the Cathedral he attempts to provide a panoramic view of his native country. As John M. Kirk stated in the International Fiction Review, this novel "presents a wider, more encompassing view of Peruvian society…. [Vargas Llosa's] gaze extends further afield in a determined effort to incorporate as many representative regions of Peru as possible." Set during the dictatorship of Manuel Odria in the late 1940s and 1950s, the book, according to Penny Leroux in a Nation review, is "one of the most scathing denunciations ever written on the corruption and immorality of Latin America's ruling classes."
The nonlinear writing of Conversation in the Cathedral was seen by several critics to be the culmination of Vargas Llosa's narrative experimentation. Kirk explained that Vargas Llosa is "attempting the ambitious and obviously impossible plan of conveying to the reader all aspects of the reality of [Peruvian] society, of writing the ‘total’ novel." By interweaving five different narratives, the author forces audiences to study the text closely, making the reader an "accomplice of the writer [which] undoubtedly helps the reader to a more profound understanding of the work." Kirk concluded that Conversation in the Cathedral is "both a perfect showcase for all the structural techniques and thematic obsessions found in [Vargas Llosa's] … other work, as well as being the true culmination of his personal anguish for Peru."
Ronald de Feo pointed out in the New Republic that this and other early novels by Vargas Llosa explore "with a near-savage seriousness and single-mindedness themes of social and political corruption." However, in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleon y las visitadoras) "a new unexpected element entered Vargas Llosa's work: an unrestrained sense of humor," de Feo reported. A farcical novel involving a military officer's assignment to provide prostitutes for troops in the Peruvian jungle, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is "told through an artful combination of dry military dispatches, juicy personal letters, verbose radio rhetoric, and lurid sensationalist news reports," Gene Bell-Villada reported in Commonweal. Vargas Llosa also mixes conversations from different places and times, as he did in previous novels. Like these earlier works, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service "sniffs out corruption in high places, but it also presents something of a break, Vargas Llosa here shedding his high seriousness and adopting a humorous ribald tone," Bell-Villada concluded. The novel's satirical attack is aimed not at the military, a Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote, but at "any institution which channels instincts into a socially acceptable ritual. The humor of the narrative derives less from this serious underlying motive, however, than from the various linguistic codes into which people channel the darker forces."
The humorous tone of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is also found in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tia Julia y el escribidor). The novel concerns two characters based on people in Vargas Llosa's own life: his first wife, Julia, who was his aunt by marriage, and a writer of radio soap opera whom the author names Pedro Camacho in the novel. The eighteen-year-old narrator, Mario, has a love affair with the thirty-two-year-old Julia. Their story is interrupted in alternate chapters by Camacho's wildly complicated soap opera scripts. As Camacho goes mad, his daily scripts for ten different soap operas become more and more entangled, with characters from one serial appearing in others and all of his plots converging into a single unlikely story. The scripts display "fissures through which are revealed secret obsessions, aversions and perversions that allow us to view his soap operas as the story of his disturbed mind," Jose Miguel Oviedo wrote in World Literature Today. "The result," explained Nicholas Shakespeare in the Times Literary Supplement, "is that Camacho ends up in an asylum, while Mario concludes his real-life soap opera by running off to marry Aunt Julia."
Although Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is as humorous as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, "it has a thematic richness and density the other book lacked," de Feo concluded. This richness is found in the novel's exploration of the writer's life and of the relationship between a creative work and its inspiration. In the contrasting of soap opera plots with the real-life romance of Mario and Julia, the novel raises questions about the distinctions between fiction and fact. In a review for New York, Carolyn Clay called Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter "a treatise on the art of writing, on the relationship of stimuli to imagination." It is, de Feo observed, "a multilayered, high-spirited, and in the end terribly affecting text about the interplay of fiction and reality, the transformation of life into art, and life seen and sometimes even lived as fiction."
In The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) Vargas Llosa for the first time sets his story outside of his native Peru. He turns instead to Brazil and bases his story on an apocalyptic religious movement that gained momentum toward the end of the nineteenth century. Convinced that the year 1900 would mark the end of the world, these zealots, led by a man named the Counselor, set up the community of Canudos. Because of the Counselor's continued denunciations of the Brazilian government, which he called the "antichrist" for its legal separation of church and state, the national government sent in troops to break up this religious community. The first military assault was repulsed, as were the second and third, but the fourth expedition involved a force of some four thousand soldiers. They laid waste to the entire area and killed nearly forty thousand people.
Vargas Llosa told Wendy Smith in Publishers Weekly that he was drawn to write of this bloody episode because he felt the fanaticism of both sides in this conflict is exemplary of late-twentieth-century Latin America. "Fanaticism is the root of violence in Latin America," he explained. In the Brazilian war, he believes, is a microcosm of Latin America. "Canudos presents a limited situation in which you can see clearly. Everything is there: a society in which on the one hand people are living a very old-fashioned life and have an archaic way of thinking, and on the other hand progressives want to impose modernism on society with guns. This creates a total lack of communication, of dialogue, and when there is no communication, war or repression or upheaval comes immediately," he told Smith. In an article for the Washington Post, Vargas Llosa explained to Curt Suplee that "in the history of the Canudos war you could really see something that has been happening in Latin American history over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the total lack of communication between two sections of a society which kill each other fighting ghosts, no? Fighting fictional enemies who are invented out of fanaticism. This kind of reciprocal incapacity of understanding is probably the main problem we have to overcome in Latin America."
Not only is The War of the End of the World set in the nineteenth century, but its length and stylistic approach are also reminiscent of that time. A writer for the London Times called it "a massive novel in the nineteenth-century tradition: massive in content, in its ambitions, in its technical achievement." Times Literary Supplement contributor Gordon Brotherston described the book as being "on the grand scale of the nineteenth century," while Salman Rushdie, writing in the New Republic, similarly defined the novel as "a modern tragedy on the grand scale." Richard Locke wrote in the Washington Post Book World that The War of the End of the World "overshadows the majority of novels published … in the past few years. Indeed, it makes most recent American fiction seem very small, very private, very gray, and very timid."
Vargas Llosa's political perspective in The War of the End of the World exhibits a marked change from his earlier works. He does not attack a corrupt society, instead treating both sides in the Canudos war ironically. The novel ends with a character from either side locked in a fight to the death. As Rushdie observed, "This image would seem to crystallize Vargas Llosa's political vision." This condemnation of both sides in the Canudos conflict reflects Vargas Llosa's view of the contemporary Latin-American scene, where rightist dictatorships often battle communist guerrillas. Suplee described Vargas Llosa as "a humanist who reviles with equal vigor tyrannies of the right or left (is there really a difference, he asks, between ‘good tortures and bad tortures’?)."
Although his political views have changed during the course of his career, taking him from a leftist supporter of communist Cuba to a strong advocate of democracy, Vargas Llosa's abhorrence of dictatorship, violence, and corruption has remained constant. He sees Latin American intellectuals as participants in a continuing cycle of "repression, chaos, and subversion," he told Philip Bennett in the Washington Post. Many of these intellectuals, Vargas Llosa explained further, "are seduced by rigidly dogmatic stands. Although they are not accustomed to pick up a rifle or throw bombs from their studies, they foment and defend the violence." Speaking of the late-twentieth-century conflict in Peru between the government and the Maoist guerrilla movement the Shining Path, Vargas Llosa clarified to Suplee that "the struggle between the guerrillas and the armed forces is really a settling of accounts between privileged sectors of society, and the peasant masses are used cynically and brutally by those who say they want to ‘liberate’ them."
Vargas Llosa believes that a Latin American writer is obligated to speak out on political matters. "If you're a writer in a country like Peru," he told Suplee, "you're a privileged person because you know how to read and write, you have an audience, you are respected. It is a moral obligation of a writer in Latin America to be involved in civic activities." This belief led Vargas Llosa in 1987 to speak out when the Peruvian government proposed to nationalize the country's banks. His protest quickly led to a mass movement in opposition to the plan, and the government was forced to back down. Vargas Llosa's supporters went on to create Fredemo, a political party calling for democracy, a free market, and individual liberty. Together with two other political parties, Fredemo established a coalition group called the Liberty Movement. In June of 1989 Vargas Llosa was chosen to be the coalition's presidential candidate for Peru's 1990 elections. Visiting small rural towns, the urban strongholds of his Marxist opponents, and the jungle villages of the country's Indians, Vargas Llosa campaigned on what he believes is Peru's foremost problem: creating democracy in the face of the rightist military and extreme Leftists. Opinion polls in late summer of 1988 showed him to be the leading contender for the presidency, with a lead of 44 to 19 percent over his nearest opponent. By the time of the election, however, Vargas Llosa's lead had eroded, and he ended up losing the election to Alberto Fujimori.
Vargas Llosa chronicles his experience as a presidential candidate in A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (El pez en el agua: Memorias). In addition to discussing the campaign, the author also offers a memoir of his early years in Peru. "One string of alternating chapters in the book ends with the young writer's departure for France in 1958," noted Rockwell Gray in Chicago's Tribune Books; "the other recreates the exhausting and dangerous [presidential] campaign that carried him to every corner of Peru." Alan Riding added in the New York Times Book Review that the book "serves as [Vargas Llosa's] … mea culpa: he explains why the aspiring writer of the 1950's became a politician in the late 1980's and why, in the end, this was a terrible mistake." Vargas Llosa's account of his childhood and young adulthood includes his ambivalent relationship with his father, whom he met for the first time at age eleven and toward whom he had an intense dislike. Mark Falcoff, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, stated: "The pages of this book dealing with the father-son relationship are among the most violent and passionate Vargas Llosa has ever written."
In discussing his failed presidential campaign in A Fish in the Water, Vargas Llosa portrays the political backstabbing, unavoidable compromises, and character attacks that tainted the campaign against Fujimori. He also writes about his alienation from the majority of Peruvians: as a white, wealthy, educated, expatriate intellectual, he had little in common with poor Peruvians of Indian descent, many of whom do not speak Spanish. Riding commented: "Tall, white and well dressed, he invariably looked out of place." Falcoff explained that "the chapters dealing with the presidential campaign suggest an impressive knowledge of Peruvian society at all levels and in the several regions, particularly the needs of its humblest groups." Gray, however, remarked: "Much of this book is engaging and informative, but it becomes at times slack, even gossipy, and assumes an interest in the nuances of Peruvian political and literary life shared by very few American readers."
After losing the campaign, Vargas Llosa returned to Europe—this time to Spain, where he assumed Spanish citizenship. His first novel after running for president, Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes), is set in his homeland amid the modern political and social strife evidenced by the rebellion of the Shining Path guerrilla movement. In part a murder mystery, the novel follows Corporal Lituma as he ventures from his home in Peru's coastal region to a mountain village to investigate the disappearance of three men. In addition to the story line of the missing men, Vargas Llosa intersperses tales of violence committed by the Shining Path as well as a romantic story involving Tomas Carreño, Lituma's guide and partner. Critics commented positively on Vargas Llosa's skill in creating a technically ambitious novel, although some reviewers remarked that the author failed to integrate the various plot lines into a coherent story line. New York Times Book Review contributor Madison Smartt Bell, for instance, wrote that "amid this multiplicity of plot potential, the reader may share Lituma's difficulty in finding any central focus, or even in identifying a single continuous thread." Similarly, Rockwell Gray, again writing in Chicago's Tribune Books, felt that "for all the author's adroit weaving of shifts in viewpoint, voice and time—his attempt to grasp Peru's dilemma from many angles—this technically interesting novel is not on a par with his best work." In contrast, Marie Arana-Ward wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "This is well-knit social criticism as trenchant as any by [Honoré de] Balzac or [Gustave] Flaubert—an ingenious patchwork of the conflicting mythologies that have shaped the New World psyche since the big bang of Columbus's first step on shore."
Vargas Llosa's next novel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto), is also set in Peru. In this dreamlike narrative, Don Rigoberto has separated from his beautiful wife, Doña Lucrecia, because of a sexual encounter between her and her stepson, Fonchito, a precocious boy who has yet to reach puberty. Don Rigoberto misses his wife terribly, and to appease his loneliness he imagines, and writes about, Lucrecia's erotic life—with him as well as with other lovers. It is unclear how much of the narrative is meant to be true and how much is a fantasy. This novel lacks the political overtones of much of Vargas Llosa's work, but it does provide "grand, sexy reading for sophisticated audiences," reflected Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal. Houston Chronicle contributor Peter Szatmary, however, found the novel structurally and thematically unsatisfying. "Unable to avoid the inherent pitfalls of erotica cliches and purple prose," wrote Szatmary, Vargas Llosa "doesn't so much invert them as they subvert him." A writer in Publishers Weekly, by contrast, remarked: "As in much of his writing, Vargas Llosa creates a certain timelessness, a dream-like play on the present. The more he leaves sex to the imagination, the more erotic and beautifully suggestive it becomes."
The author mixes fiction and fact in his novel The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo), which concerns Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, and his death remains a cause for celebration in the Dominican Republic. Despite his cruelty and perversions, Trujillo was supported by the U.S. government since he was seen as being strongly against communism. Vargas Llosa tells the story of Urania Cabral, a successful New York City lawyer who was victimized by her father and Trujillo shortly before the dictator's death. Moving forward and back in time, in the author's trademark style, the novel gives a detailed portrait of Trujillo and his frustration with the one enemy he could not conquer: his own advancing age. Obsessive about his habits and grooming, he is unable to do a thing about his increasing incontinence and sexual impotence. The methods he used to victimize individuals and, in fact, his entire country are laid out here, while the stories of Urania, her father, and the men who killed Trujillo are also presented with empathy. "This is an impressively crafted novel," commented Sebastian Shakespeare in the New Statesman. "The set pieces are magnificent … but it's the small details that you recall: the smell of cheap perfume sprayed onto electric chairs to conceal the stench of urine, excrement and charred flesh." Noting that the Trujillista era was characterized by its vileness, Liliana Wendorff added in Library Journal that Vargas Llosa "skillfully uses language to demystify subjects that could easily offend." Jonathan Heawood concluded on the Guardian Unlimited Web site that "The Feast of the Goat is as dark and complicated as a Jacobean revenge tragedy; but it is also rich and humane."
Vargas Llosa continues to blend reality in fiction in The Way to Paradise (El paraíso en la otra esquina). In this novel he contrasts, chapter by chapter, the rebellious lives of the painter Paul Gaugin with that of his maternal grandmother, Flora Tristán. Both Gaugin and Tristán chose to live outside of the norms of European middle-class society. A stockbroker by trade, Gaugin left his life behind to live and paint in remote areas of the South Pacific, returning to France only twice in the last twelve years of his life. After his death from syphilis, his paintings became extremely influential in the art world. Similarly, Tristán left behind her violent husband to travel through France with her young daughter, Aline. Tristán actively championed women's liberation, cooperatives, and working-class causes. She went from town to town to accomplish her goals. The pair never met; Tristán died about four years before Gaugin was born. Discussing the novel with interviewer Ana Mendosa for the EFE World News Service, Vargas Llosa explained that he was attracted to Flora's utopian spirit, but that he sees some danger in the obsessive quest for a perfect world. Collective utopias, such as those envisioned by the Inquisition, Nazism, Soviet Communism, Maosim, and fundamentalist Islam are examples of "hecatombs," in his view. "We must try to eradicate Utopia," Vargas Llosa went on to say. "In reality, democracy is the antithesis of Utopia since it starts by assuming that a perfect society does not exist, but that obstacles can be overcome, that there can be more justice and less oppression."
Summarizing the appeal of The Way to Paradise, a critic for Kirkus Reviews noted that "there isn't a page of this magnificently imagined and orchestrated story that does not vibrate with the energy and mystery of felt, and fully comprehended, life."
Vargas Llosa analyzes the novel itself in Letters to a Young Novelist (Cartas a un joven novelista). The book consists of eleven letters or essays written by a successful novelist to an aspiring author and fan. Ulrich Baer in the Library Journal noted that "his consistently brilliant observations constitute critical revelations in their own right." In the pieces, the author offers his advice and theories on writing and literature. He also discusses the merits of certain prominent novelists from several Western traditions, such as Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gustave Flaubert. Often compared to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Letters to a Young Novelist is "neither a survey course in what to read nor a practical guide to writing," according to a Publishers Weekly critic, who added that "the book finally is a meditation on writing and its proper relationship to life."
Vargas Llosa has also published collections of his essays, many of which originally appeared in his newspaper column in El País. Though composed with journalistic objectivity, many of these works are about topics on which the author has strong personal feelings. Like Making Waves before it, The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary includes many pieces on such political topics as democracy in Latin America and globalization, as well as on cultural topics. Included in The Language of Passion are pieces on a romance writer who endowed an award for her fellow writers, everyday existence in a small community in Palestine, and an homage to Bob Marley. Commenting positively on the "clear, crisp manner" in which the essays are written, Neal Wyatt noted in Library Journal that many of the essays "are imbued with a wit and an intellect that make them instantly engaging."
As its title indicates, Touchstones: Essays on Literature, Art and Politics offers observations on a wide range of themes. Included is a diary of Vargas Llosa's trip to Iraq in June and July 2003. This piece, according to Spectator contributor Malcolm Deas, is admirable in that it shows the author's "recognition of his own limitations as an observer, and … his willingness to publish reflections that inevitably show that he did not prophesy all that has come to pass." Indeed, New Statesman writer Jason Cowley considered the book's piece on Iraq "urgent and complicated, … [if] cruelly dated." As the critic noted, Vargas Llosa visited that country before Saddam Hussein had been captured, and his conversations with Iraqis convinced him that the suffering inflicted on civilians by the invasion "is small compared to the horror they suffered under Saddam Hussein." In light of the subsequent escalation of violence in Iraq, Cowly wrote, one must wonder whether this judgment remains valid.
The collection's essays on Peruvian and Latin American politics, Deas wrote, "are sensible and straightforward" but not nearly as engaging as are Vargas Llosa's best political novels. As for literary analysis, the book, in Deas's view, presents simple and direct discussions of writers and books that Vargas Llosa admires, including many that have lost favor in recent years, such as Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. He describes the experience of reading these works and how they affected his own development as a writer. As Deas pointed out, Vargas Llosa "is an enthusiast, with an uncommon faculty for not stinting praise."
In The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, Vargas Llosa presents what Library Journal reviewer Nedra Crowe Evers considered "a remarkable critique of Victor Hugo's masterpiece." As Vargas Llosa shows, Hugo continued to add to his original novel as his political, social, and spiritual philosophies evolved. As a result, Les Miserables explores the complex realities that underly the novel's utopian spirit. Admirers of Hugo "will value this insightful study," concluded Bryce Christensen in a Booklist review.
The novel The Bad Girl recounts the obsessive love affair between a well-to-do Peruvian boy, Ricardo, and the flirtatious Lily. When they first meet in the 1950s she steals his heart, but she lies to him about who she really is; soon Lily disappears from Ricardo's life, only to reappear at various intervals and places throughout the years, and with various new identities: a Cuban revolutionary; the wife of a French diplomat; the wife of an English aristocrat; the mistress of a creepy Japanese mobster. Each time Lily crosses his path, Ricardo falls in love with her all over again. Guardian Unlimited Web site reviewer James Lasdun found The Bad Girl "a so-so novel by a first-rate author." The relationship between Ricardo and Lily, the critic explained, feels "static." While readers might expect "a deepening sense of its inner reality to emerge with each re-encounter—a tightening scrutiny of what it is that binds these lovers together—you get incantatory repetition instead," Lasdun wrote. "In place of psychology or even pathology you get biological descriptions of the changing state of [Lily's] … vagina and breasts that come across merely as salacious." Lasdun also observed that Vargas Llosa's skill at evoking settings in brilliant detail is not in evidence in this novel.
In Houston Chronicle, Suzanne Ferriss called The Bad Girl's protagonist "one of the most coldhearted, narcissistic women in fiction, combining Emma Bovary's disdain and calculation with Lolita's cunning indifference." By contrast, Ricardo is depicted as a good boy who will do anything to meet Lily's demands. Despite finding these characters unbelievable, Ferriss acknowledged that the novel's melodramatic story exerts a strong melodramatic pull. Cesar Ferreira, writing in World Literature Today, enjoyed the novel's many lighthearted moments, observing that "humor and tragedy are carefully woven in a linear narrative depicting a relationship filled with treason, melodrama, and eroticism." Ferreira noted that the book also "chronicles important political and social events in contemporary Europe" as well as in Peru.
New York Times Book Review contributor Kathryn Harrison described The Bad Girl as a "splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel" that is "one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling" of a classic: in this case, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. In Harrison's view, Lily and Emma Bovary are both heroic female characters because "they refuse to be diminished by modest, reasonable hopes or by respectable society. Creatures of appetite … bad girls serve their hunger first, and last. They are terrible and they are enviable, because they won't settle for less than everything they want." The Bad Girl, according to a writer for Kirkus Reviews, demonstrates that "a contemporary master remains at the top of his game."
"A major figure in contemporary Latin American letters," as Locke explained in the Washington Post BookWorld, Vargas Llosa is usually ranked with Jorgé Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and other writers in what has been called the Latin American "boom" of the 1960s. His body of work set in his native Peru, Suzanne Jill Levine explained in New York Times Book Review, is "one of the largest narrative efforts in contemporary Latin American letters…. [He] has begun a complete inventory of the political, social, economic and cultural reality of Peru…. Very deliberately, Vargas Llosa has chosen to be his country's conscience."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Booker, Keith M., Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 1994.
Contemporary Hispanic Biography, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2002.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 145: Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, Second Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Feal, Rosemary Geisdorfer, Novel Lives: The Fictional Autobiographies of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Mario Vargas Llosa, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1986.
Gallagher, D.P., Modern Latin-American Literature, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.
Gerdes, Dick, Mario Vargas Llosa, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1985.
Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers, Harper (New York, NY), 1967.
Hispanic Literature Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.
Köllman, Sabine, Vargas Llosa's Fiction and the Demons of Politics, P. Lang (New York, NY), 2002.
Kristal, Efrain, Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, Vanderbilt University Press (Nashville, TN), 1998.
Lewis, Marvin A., From Lime to Leticia: The Peruvian Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1983.
A Marxist Reading of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Puig, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1994.
Moses, Michael Valdez, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.
Muñoz, Braulio, A Storyteller: Mario Vargas Llosa between Civilization and Barbarism, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2000.
Reference Guide to World Literature, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.
Rossmann, Charles, and Alan Warren Friedman, editors, Mario Vargas Llosa: A Collection of Critical Essays, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1978.
Vargas Llosa, Mario, A Fish in the Water: A Memoir, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1994.
Williams, Raymond Leslie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ungar (New York, NY), 1986.
PERIODICALS
American Enterprise, June, 2005, Mario Vargas Llosa, "Confessions of an Old-fashioned Liberal," p. 40.
Atlantic, March, 1986, Phoebe-Lou Adams, review of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, p. 112.
Booklist, May 1, 2007, Bryce Christensen, review of The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, p. 64.
Business Wire, April 3, 2002, "Vargas Llosa Ends Years of Silence and Tells, for the First Time, Why He Left Peru," p. 2161.
Commonweal, June 8, 1979, Gene Bell-Villada, review of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, p. 346.
Economist, July 9, 1988, "The Perils of Ungovernment," p. 47; April 22, 1989, "Pen-power," p. 86; July 1, 1989, "The Stratagems of a Novelist," p. 34; April 14, 1990, review of The Storyteller, p. 101.
EFE World News Service, November 15, 2001, "Vargas Llosa: Democracy Is Possible in Latin America," p. 1008319; October 14, 2002, "Vargas Llosa to Head Trans-Atlantic Freedom Forum," p. 1008287; December 6, 2002, "Vargas Llosa, Savater: Castro Was behind Book Fair Incident," p. 1008339; January 29, 2003, "Vargas Llosa Alarmed by ‘Voracity’ of Ruling Party Members," p. 1008029; April 1, 2003, Ana Mendosa, "Vargas Llosa: The Journey's the Thing, Not the Destination," p. 1008091; May 6, 2003, "Writer Says Latin America Should Take Spanish Path to Democracy," p. 1008126.
Houston Chronicle, April 21, 1996, "Novel Shows Peru Cursed by Its Past," p. 23; July 5, 1998, Peter Szatmary, "Vargas Llosa Erotic Novel Fails to Satisfy," p. 21; November 17, 2002, "A Writer's View: Peruvian Novelist Conveys the Nature of Dictatorship," p. 2; November 17, 2002, "An Artist Engaged; Fiction Writer Mario Vargas Llosa Stays Grounded in Reality," p. 19; December 14, 2007, Suzanne Ferriss, review of The Bad Girl.
International Fiction Review, January, 1977, John M. Kirk, review of Conversation in the Cathedral.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2003, review of The Way to Paradise, p. 1200; September 15, 2007, review of The Bad Girl.
Library Journal, April 1, 1998, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, p. 126; June 1, 2001, Liliana Wendorff, review of The Feast of the Goat, p. S31; April 1, 2002, Ulrich Baer, review of Letters to a Young Novelist, p. 110; April 1, 2003, Neal Wyatt, review of The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary, p. 99; May 1, 2007, Nedra Crowe Evers, review of The Temptation of the Impossible, p. 81; November 1, 2007, Jack Shreve, review of The Bad Girl, p. 62.
Nation, November 22, 1975, Penny Leroux, review of Conversation in the Cathedral; March 8, 1986, Paul Berman, review of La chunga, p. 281; March 29, 1986, Terrence Rafferty, review of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, p. 461.
National Review, March 24, 1989, "Have Typewriter, Will Run," p. 33; February 5, 1990, George Sim Johnston, review of The Storyteller, p. 56; May 14, 1990, "Prolonging Peru's Solitude?," p. 26.
New Leader, December 1, 1986, George Woodcock, review of The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and "Madame Bovary," p. 13; February 5, 1990, Alan Wade, review of The Storyteller, p. 22.
New Republic, August 16, 1982, Ronald de Feo, review of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, p. 39; October 8, 1984, Salman Rushdie, review of The War of the End of the World, pp. 25-27.
New Statesman, March 25, 2002, Sebastian Shakespeare, review of The Feast of the Goat, p. 57; November 24, 2003, Jonathan Heawood, review of The Way to Paradise, p. 55; April 16, 2007, Jason Cowley, "Engaged and Sincere."
Newsweek International, November 3, 2003, Joseph Contreras, interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, p. 68.
New York, August 23, 1982, Carolyn Clay, review of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, p. 90.
New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1984, Suzanne Jill Levine, review of Conversation in the Cathedral, p. 42; May 15, 1994, Alan Riding, review of A Fish in the Water, p. 10; October 1, 1995, p. 36; February 18, 1996, Madison Smartt Bell, review of Death in the Andes, p. 7; October 14, 2007, Kathryn Harrison, "Dangerous Obsession."
New York Times Magazine, November 20, 1983, Alan Riding, "Revolution and the Intellectual in Latin America," interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, p. 28; November 5, 1989, Gerald Marzoratti, "Can a Novelist Save Peru?," p. 44; November 18, 2001, "Dictating History: Questions for Mario Vargas Llosa," p. 27; October 7, 2007, "The Storyteller," p. 15.
People, February 10, 1986, Campbell Geeslin, review of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, p. 16; June 15, 1987, Campbell Geeslin, review of Who Killed Palomino Molero?, p. 21.
Publishers Weekly, October 5, 1984, Wendy Smith, interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, p. 98; March 23, 1998, review of The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, p. 76; April 22, 2002, review of Letters to a Young Novelist, p. 57; August 20, 2007, review of The Bad Girl, p. 43.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1997, "Outside, Looking In: Aunt Julia and Vargas Llosa."
Romanic Review, January 2007, Catherine Nesci, "Le Paradis—un peu plus loin," p. 106.
Spectator, April 7, 2007, Malcolm Deas, "The Great Novelist as Generous Critic."
Theatre Journal, December, 1994, Catherine Diamond, review of La chunga, p. 544.
Time, March 10, 1986, R.Z. Sheppard, review of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, p. 74; December 22, 1986, R.Z. Sheppard, review of The Perpetual Orgy, p. 76; July 27, 1987, review of Who Killed Palomino Molero?, p. 64; November 13, 1989, Paul Gray, review of The Storyteller, p. 110; December 1, 2003, "Kindred Spirits: Mario Vargas Llosa Weaves a Vivid Tale of Gauguin's and His Grandmother's Lives," p. 93.
Times (London, England), May 13, 1985, review of The War of the End of the World.
Times Literary Supplement, October 12, 1973, review of Pantaleon y las visitadoras, p. 1208; June 9, 1978, Nicholas Shakespeare, review of La tia Julia y el escribidor, p. 638; May 17, 1985, Gordon Brotherston, review of The War of the End of the World, p. 540; June 17, 1994, Mark Falcoff, review of A Fish in the Water, p. 11.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), September 11, 1994, Rockwell Gray, review of A Fish in Water, p. 7; March 3, 1996, Rockwell Gray, review of Death in the Andes, p. 6.
U.S. News & World Report, May 9, 1988, "A Writer's Use of Adversity," p. 69.
Washington Post, August 29, 1983, Philip Bennett, "Conscience of His Country; ‘19th-century Novel- ist’ Mario Vargas Llosa and His 20th-century Solutions for Peru," interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, p. C1; October 1, 1984, Curt Suplee, "Voice from the End of the World; Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa: Peru's Prolific Political Conscience, Fighting Tyrannies Left and Right," interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, p. B1.
Washington Post Book World, August 26, 1984, Richard Locke, review of The War of the End of the World, p. 1; February 25, 1996, Marie Arana-Ward, review of Death in the Andes, p. 1.
Weekly Standard, May 30, 2005, "Latin Prescription: Is There a Cure for South America's Sickness?," p. 34.
World Literature Today, winter, 1978, Gregory Rabassa, review of The Green House; spring, 1978, Jose Miguel Oviedo, review of La tia Julia y el escribidor, p. 261; April 1, 2003, Cesar Ferreira, review of Bases para una interpretacion de Ruben Dario, p. 79; May 1, 2005, Will H. Corral, review of La tentación de lo imposible: Victor Hugo y Los miserables, p. 111; September 1, 2005, Cesar Ferreira, review of Entrevistas escogidas: Selección, p. 107.
ONLINE
Books and Writers,http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ (October 10, 2005), biography of Mario Vargas Llosa.
Guardian Unlimited,http://books.guardian.co.uk/ (May 1, 2002), Jonathan Heawood, review of The Feast of the Goat; James Lasdun, "Dark Honey and Mischief."
January Magazine Online,http://www.januarymagazine.com/ (August 16, 2004), Heidi Johnson-Wright, interview with Mario Vargas Llosa.
Mario Vargas Llosa Home Page,http://www.mvargasllosa.com (January 15, 2008).
OTHER
Sklodowska, Elzbieta, An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, American Audio Prose Library, 1994.