Lima, Peru – Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of Nobel literature and giant of Latin American letters for many decades, has died, said her son on Sunday. He was 89 years old.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, died peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,” read a letter signed by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, and published by Álvaro on X.
The letter indicates that his remains will be cremated and that there will be no public ceremony.
“His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers from the whole world, but we hope they will find comfort, like us, in the fact that he appreciated a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind a work body that will survive him,” they added.
He was the author of famous novels like “The Time of the Hero” (La Ciudad y los Perros) and “Feast of the Goat”.
A prolific beginning and essayist and winner of Myriad Prize, Vargas Llosa received the Nobel in 2010 after being considered a competitor for many years.
Vargas Llosa published his first collection of stories “The Cubs and Other Stories” (Los Jefs) in 1959. But he burst into the literary scene in 1963 with his first revolutionary novel “The Time of the Hero”, a book that attracted its experiences in a Peruvian military academy and angry the military of the country. A thousand copies of the novel were burned by the military authorities, some generals calling for the book False and Vargas Llosa Communist.
This, and subsequent novels such as “Conversation in the Cathedral” (Conversacación in the Cateddral) in 1969, quickly established Vargas Llosa as one of the leaders of the so-called “Boom”, or a new wave of Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.
Vargas Llosa started writing early, and at 15 was a part -time journalist for the newspaper La Crónica. According to his official website, other jobs he had included revision names on the graves of the cemetery in Peru, working as a teacher at the Berlitz school in Paris and briefly on the Spanish agency office France-Press in Paris.
He continued to publish articles in the press during most of his life, especially in a chronicle of political opinion twice months entitled “Piedra de Toque” (touchstones) printed in several newspapers.
Vargas Llosa has become a fierce defender of personal and economic freedoms, gradually moving away from his past linked to communism, and regularly attacked Latin American left-wing leaders whom he considered dictators.
Although one of the first supporters of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, he then grew up and denounced Cuba of Castro. In 1980, he said that he no longer believed in socialism as a solution for developing countries.
In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa struck his Nobel colleague and ex-friend García Márquez, which he then ridiculed as “Castro courtesan”. It has never been clear if the fight was on politics or a personal dispute, because no writer has ever wanted to discuss it publicly.
While he slowly turned his political trajectory to conservatism on the free market, Vargas Llosa has lost the support of many of his contemporaries literary in Latin America and attracted many criticisms even of admirers of his work.
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in the south of the city of Peru, Arequipa, high in the Andes at the foot of the Misti volcano.
His father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, left the family before birth. To avoid the public scandal, her mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, took her child to Bolivia, where her father was the Peruvian consul of Cochabamba.
Vargas Llosa said that his first life was “somewhat traumatic”, pampered by his mother and grandmother in a large house with servants, all her whims granted.
It was not until the age of 10, after the family moved to the coastal city of Piura in Peru, that he learned that his father was alive. His parents reconciled and the family moved to the capital of Peru, Lima.
Vargas Llosa described his father as a disciplinary who considered his son’s love for Jules Verne and writing poetry as infantile ways towards famine, and feared for his “virility”, believing that “poets are always homosexuals”.
After omitting to register the boy to a naval academy because he was a minor, Vargas Llosa’s father sent him to Leoncio Prado Military Academy – an experience that was to stay with Vargas Llosa and led to “hero’s time”. The book won the Spanish criticism prize.
The military academy “was like discovering hell,” said Vargas Llosa later.
He entered the University of San Marcos in Peru to study literature and law: “The first as a vocation and the second to please my family, who believed, not without cause, that writers generally die of hunger.”
After graduating in literature in 1958 – he did not take the trouble to submit his final law thesis – Vargas Llosa won a scholarship to continue a doctorate in Madrid.
Vargas Llosa attracted a large part of his inspiration from his Peruvian homeland, but preferred to live abroad, living each year for spells in Madrid, New York and Paris.
His first novels revealed a Peruvian world of arrogance and military brutality, aristocratic decadence, and Amazon Indians of the stone age existing simultaneously with the 20th century urban burn.
“Peru is a kind of incurable disease and my relationship with it is intense, severe and full of violence of passion,” wrote Vargas Llosa in 1983.
After 16 years in Europe, he returned in 1974 to a Peru then governed by a leftist military dictatorship. “I realized that I lost contact with the reality of my country, and especially his language, which for a writer can be deadly,” he said.
In 1990, he presented himself to the presidency of Peru, a reluctant candidate in a nation torn apart by a maid insurrection of guerrilla warfare and a case of basket, an economy of hyperinflation.
But he was defeated by a unknown university rector, Alberto Fujimori, who resolved a large part of political and economic chaos but has become a corrupt and authoritarian leader in the process.
The Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the longtime friend of Vargas Llosa, later confessed that he had rooted the candidacy of the writer, observing: “The uncertain gain of Peru would be the loss of literature. Literature is eternity, politics of politics.”
Vargas Llosa also used his literary talents to write several successful novels on the life of real people, notably the French post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, Flora Tristan, in “The 2019 way to a coup supported by the United States in Guatemala in 1954.
He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and organized publications by teachers and writers resident in more than a dozen colleges and universities around the world.
In adolescence, Vargas Llosa joined a communist cell and fled with and later married a 33 -year -old Bolivian, Julia Urquidi – The sister -in -law of her uncle. He then was inspired by their nine -year wedding to write the successful comic strip novel “Aunt Julia and the screenwriter” (La Tía Julia Y El Escridor).
In 1965, he married his Germain cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 his junior and, together, they had three children. They divorced 50 years later, and he started a relationship with the figure of the Spanish company Isabel Preyler, the former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and the mother of the singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022.
He leaves to mourn his children.
– Giles reported in Madrid.
