(Arequipa, Peru, 1936) Peruvian writer. With the publication of the novel La ciudad y los perros (1963), Mario Vargas Llosa became established as one of the fundamental figures of the "boom" of Spanish-American literature in the 1960s. Like other members of the same group, his work broke with the channels of traditional narrative by assuming the innovations of foreign narrative (William Faulkner, James Joyce) and adopting techniques such as the internal monologue, the plurality of points of view or chronological fragmentation, generally placed at the service of a crude realism.
On the other hand, important critical contributions and deep reflections on the craft of writing are also due to the Peruvian novelist, such as his theory on "inner demons", which tries to explain writing as an act of expulsion, by the creator, of the elements of consciousness capable of incubating disturbances that only the act of writing can exorcise. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 crowned an exemplary career.
He spends his childhood between Bolivia and Peru and after finishing his primary studies he collaborates in the newspapers La Crónica and La Industria. In 1952 he wrote a play entitled La huida del Inca, which premiered in a theater in Lima.
He studied Letters and Law at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and began to collaborate professionally in newspapers and magazines, being editor of Cuadernos de Composition and the magazine Literatura.
In 1958 he was awarded the "Javier Prado" scholarship at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he obtained the title of Doctor of Philosophy and Letters. A year later he moved to Paris, and there he worked in different media until he managed to get into Agence France Press and, later, in French Radio Television, where he met many Spanish-American writers.
In 1965 he joined the Cuban magazine Casa de las Américas as a member of its editorial board and remained there until 1971. In those years he acted several times as a jury for the Casa de las Américas awards.
Later he travels to New York, invited to the World Congress of the PEN Club, and settles his residence in London, where he works as a professor of Spanish-American Literature at Queen Mary College.
During this period he also works as a translator for UNESCO in Greece, together with Julio Cortázar; until 1974 his life and that of his family was spent in Europe, residing in Paris, London and Barcelona.
In 1975 he began a series of cinematographic works, and in March of that year he was elected a Number Member of the Royal Peruvian Academy of Language. In 1976 he was elected president of the International PEN Club, a position he held until 1979.
In Peru he presents the television program La Torre de Babel and in 1983 he presided over the Investigative Commission of the Uchuraccay case, dedicated to solving the murder of eight journalists. At the end of the eighties he entered the world of politics in Peru and in 1990 he returned to London, where he resumed his literary activity.
In March 1993 he obtained Spanish nationality, without renouncing his Peruvian one. He collaborates with the newspaper El País and with the cultural magazine Letras Libres.
In 1994 he is named a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and that same year he wins the Miguel de Cervantes Award; later he is recognized doctor honoris causa in numerous universities. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.
In 2013 he was awarded the Columnistas de El Mundo award, in recognition of his journalistic side.
Formed in the generational framework of the fifties (his first book is from 1959: the collection of short stories titled Los jefes), Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most famous Spanish-American novelists in the world, and perhaps the one who has written the largest number of novels of very high quality. As a narrator, Vargas Llosa matured early: The City and the Dogs (1963) is the first completely "modern" Peruvian novel in expressive resources. La Casa Verde (1966), Los puppies (1967) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969) anointed him as one of the protagonists of the "boom" of the Spanish-American novel of the 1960s and as the most characteristically neorealist of the group, with a technical virtuosity of enormous international influence.
His later novels, with the exception of the most ambitious of all, La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, an acute portrait of the sociocultural heterogeneity of Latin America), abandoned the design of creating "total novels" that had obsessed him until then, and opted for by the (ironic or transgressive) reworking of sub-literary or extra-literary forms or genres, frequently raising a reflection on the limits of reality and fiction that recreates aspects of fantastic literature and narrative experimentalism, without falling into them completely: the farce, in Pantaleon and the visitors (1973); melodrama, in Aunt Julia and the writer (1977); anticipatory politics-fiction, in Historia de Mayta (1984); the story of crime and mystery, in Who killed Palomino Molero? (1986) and Lituma in the Andes (1993); the erotic narrative, in Elogio de la madrastra (1988) and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997); and politics, in La fiesta del chivo (2000).
There is no doubt that the narrative occupies the central place of his abundant production. His masterful technical prowess, his ability to make each one of them a solid world capable of self-sustaining and the fact of granting total autonomy to the narrative task are his central virtues. In all his books, including those like Pantaleon and the Visitors or Aunt Julia and the Writer could be considered minor, the form acquires the highest degree of importance.
His narrative production began in 1959 with the stories of Los jefes and achieved international resonance with the novel La ciudad y los perros (1963, Biblioteca Breve prize in 1962), a reflection and denunciation of the paramilitary organization of the Leoncio Prado College, where the author He had completed his secondary studies. The closed and oppressive environment of that military school in Lima seems to epitomize all the violence and corruption of the world today; the "dogs" of the title are the first-year students, subjected to cruel hazing by the elders.
Leaving aside its social and ethical problems, the novel shows an astonishing maturity due to the ambiguous and changeable lines of the characters, the precise description of urban environments, its winding plot and the skilful treatment of narrative time. Far from attenuating, the experimentalism and the overlapping of times, characters and actions intensifies its brutal and shocking realism and the portrayal of explicit or underlying violence.
His literary consolidation came with La casa verde (1966), a true exhibition of literary virtuosity whose prose integrates abundant experimental elements, such as the mixture of dialogue and description and the combination of actions and diverse times. The story, which takes place mainly in a brothel, presents several parallel stories with an extremely complex montage, with juxtaposition of time frames and changes of point of view.
Such resources are also used in part in Los cachorros (1967), whose theme, a boarding school, refers us in its initial phase to the theme of The city and the dogs; and in Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), a broad historical-political tableau of Peru (with suggestions of libel against the regime of the Peruvian dictator Manuel Odría) composed through the dialogues held between a journalist and a dictator's black bodyguard. Such dialogues take place in "La Catedral", the name of the modest bar in Lima where they share their failed lives.
In the two following novels, Vargas Llosa seemed to renounce the big themes to tackle a more playful path, in search of new possibilities for his narrative. Pantaleon and the Visitors (1973) is a humorous satire of the military bureaucracy that adds a brutal and grotesque component to its always lucid vision of power, similar to the Hispanic grotesque. Aunt Julia and the writer (1977), perhaps influenced by the stories of the Argentine Manuel Puig, develops in counterpoint sentimental experiences and the world of radio serials.
La guerra del fin del mundo (1981), on the other hand, claims to be once again a "total" work. In it he addressed the social and religious problems of Latin America through the story of a messianic revolt; The work is inspired by a Brazilian journalism classic from the turn of the century, the book Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha, from which he reconstructs and elaborates the novel's plot.
A writer by trade and tireless worker, who has been awarded numerous prizes throughout his career, his prose gradually acquired a medium or journalistic tone in his later novels, which perhaps implies a certain decrease compared to previous works, but which has increased. its audience among the reading public.
In this direction, it is worth noting Historia de Mayta (1984), a survey about an old schoolmate who, in 1958, led an uprising in an Andean town; Who killed Palomino Molero? (1986), which is itself a narrative process under the pretext of a police investigation; and El hablador (1987), about a storyteller among the primitive tribes of Latin America. This last work revealed his fascination with the oral tradition of the jungle, a region that has always motivated his literary imagination; Such communion with indigenous roots in a normally cosmopolitan writer is striking.
His novel Lituma en los Andes (1993) won the Planeta Award; a year later he compiled his journalistic contributions in Challenges to Freedom (1994). In 1997 his erotic novel Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto appeared, along the same lines as his previous Elogio de la madrastra (1988). In the tradition of the dictator novel, Vargas Llosa would also publish an ambitious and total work, La fiesta del chivo (2000), in which he masterfully reconstructs the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Six years later, he published Travesuras de la niña mala (2006), a story between the comic and the tragic in which love shows itself to be the owner of a thousand faces. The Discreet Hero (2013) is by far his most recent novel.
Apart from his narrative work, Vargas Llosa has developed sustained critical work and is the author of original and in-depth studies on various authors and literary issues. Among them are García Márquez: history of a deicide (1971), dedicated to a singular interpretation of the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude; The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (1975), about the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the great stylist of realism; The Truth of Lies (1990), a collection of essays on twenty-five contemporary novelists; The archaic utopia: José María Arguedas and the fictions of indigenismo (1996), where he analyzes the life and work of José María Arguedas; Letters to a novelist (1997), a kind of propaedeutic for the novel, aimed especially at young writers, and El viaje a la ficción. The world of Juan Carlos Onetti (2008), where he analyzes in depth the life and work of the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti.
His foray into the theater, although less successful, has been frequent: Miss Tacna (1981), Kathie and the hippopotamus (1983), La chunga (1986), El loco de los balcones (1993), Pretty eyes, ugly pictures (1996), Odysseus and Penelope (2007) and At the foot of the Thames (2008) are the dramatic pieces that he has published to date and in which he preferably explores individual destinies. The three volumes of Contra viento y marea (1983-1990) collect a selection of his chronicles, articles and other journalistic works. In 1993, El pez en el agua appeared, a memoir in which he traced a double story: the adventures of his presidential campaign in 1990 and an account from his childhood until the moment he decided to leave for Europe to dedicate himself to writing.
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