At 15 Mario Vargas Llosa was a crime reporter. Still in his teens, he eloped with his aunt and later turned the story into a comic novel. He has been attacked by fellow Latin American writers for his right-wing views, and his political ambitions reached their peak when he stood for president in his native Peru. Maya Jaggi reports
When Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president in 1990 in his native Peru, many of his readers prayed he would lose. As his friend, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, observed: “Peru’s uncertain gain would be literature’s loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history.”
That may have been scant consolation to the vanquished Vargas Llosa when the dark-horse victor, Alberto Fujimori, seized dictatorial powers in 1992 and fell only in 2000. But for the nearly man, who maintains that he lost the election largely for telling the truth, his candidacy was a “terrible mistake”, which he does not regret. “It was a very instructive experience, though not pleasant,” he says. “I learned I’m not a politician but a writer.”
For the expatriate Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, Vargas Llosa is “one of the best novelists in the Spanish language of our time”. In 1963 at only 26, having published a ground-breaking debut novel The Time of the Hero, Vargas Llosa was garnering international acclaim for Latin American literature, alongside the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel Garca Mrquez. But far from being an exponent of their “magic realism” he is a “hyper-realist”, says Jason Wilson, professor of Latin American literature at University College London.
Yet Vargas Llosa’s political trajectory has brought him enemies. His move from supporting to denouncing Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the early 1970s spurred a falling out with the boom authors; he ridiculed his erstwhile friend Garca Mrquez as “Castro’s courtesan”. By the 1980s he had declared a curious affinity with British conservative thinking. He later stood for the Peruvian presidency on a platform of Andean Thatcherism.
“His political position stains his literature,” says the Argentinian writer Luisa Valenzuela. For many admirers he remains a perplexing composite. “He’s a wonderful novelist but a hopeless, dangerous politician,” says Richard Gott, author of a recent book on Venezuela’s president Hugo Ch-vez. For the critic Alberto Manguel there is a “troubling paradox” in the “two Vargas Llosas” between the vision of the novelist and playwright and his views in the press. Likening him to a “sightless photographer … blind to the human reality that his lens had so powerfully captured”, Manguel says “it seems as if the politician has never read the writer”.
Vargas Llosa’s bruising political defeat drove the memoir A Fish in the Water (1993), whose chapters on the budding artist alternate with what the Observer reviewer Boyd Tonkin called an “epic whinge” about his failed presidential bid. His 13th novel, The Feast of the Goat, a translation that will be available next month, may be a subtler reflection of his political baptism. Hailed by Manguel as a masterpiece, it is set during and after the 1930-61 dictatorship of President Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. It anticipates Trujillo’s assassination in 1961 through the dictator’s eyes, those of his would-be assassins and the expatriate daughter of one of his aides.
The portrayal of his heroic assassins as flawed proved explosive in the Dominican Republic when the author visited in 2000. “The families [of the conspirators] weren’t happy because, with a martyr or hero, what you expect is hagiography, not realism,” says Vargas Llosa. Earlier this year, however, he returned to Santo Domingo, the capital. “It made me happy because the controversy was still going on: young people were saying to their parents ‘Why didn’t you say a word during the dictatorship?'”
Now 65, Vargas Llosa betrays little sign of bitterness, but rather laughs at mention of his presidential rout. He speaks enthusiastically in accented English about the “radical liberalism” he still champions. A dual national (he accepted Spanish citizenship in 1993) fluent in Spanish, French and English, he lives in Paris, Madrid, the Peruvian capital Lima, and London, where he and his wife Patricia have an apartment in Knightsbridge.
Of their three children, all educated in England, Alvaro is a journalist and writer, Gonzalo works for UNHCR in Geneva, and Morgana is a photojournalist for El Pas in Madrid.
Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, a colonial city at the foot of the Misti volcano in southern Peru. His parents had separated before he was born, his father, Ernesto Vargas, walking out after only five months of marriage to Dora Llosa. Mario grew up in his mother’s middle-class family. Shamed by Dora’s “fatherless” child they moved to Bolivia, and after eight years in this “paradise”, they returned to Peru.
Mario was 10 before he learned his father was still alive. His parents reconciled and he and his mother moved to the capital, Lima, to live with Ernesto, who Mario hated and feared for his rage and beatings. “Reading was my escape,” the son says. But Ernesto despised Mario’s literary leanings as being a route to starvation, or, worse still, proof of homosexuality. The shy, sheltered boy was packed off at 14 to the Leoncio Prado military academy in Lima, to make a man of him.
It was, he says, like discovering hell. “Leoncio Prado was a window on the real country, Peruvian society in miniature. Because of grants you had all social classes and races white, black, Indians, mestizos [mixed Spanish-Indian parentage], mulattos [mixed black-white parentage], from the upper class to the very poor. It was an explosive climate where everybody was prejudiced … it was an extraordinary lesson.”
He says: “My father was terrified by my literary inclinations he thought me a total failure, a bohemian. But with Leoncio Prado he gave me my first subject.” In The Time of the Hero the academy, with its military discipline and bullying, is a violent microcosm of “particoloured Peruvian society” under General Manuel Odra’s 1948-56 military rule. Copies of the book were burned in the academy’s grounds and the author barred. This year, however, Vargas Llosa was invited back with a British TV crew. “I was received with such kindness by the colonel the head of the school who gave me as a present the Peruvian flag,” laughs Vargas Llosa.
“Machismo is, unfortunately, still very much alive in Latin America,” he says. “I had to disguise my literary vocation in a way that the machista environment would accept it.” He penned “beautiful, romantic letters” for fellow cadets to send their girlfriends. Saturday afternoons often involved visits to the brothel, a “central institution in Latin American life”, he says. A Piura brothel gave its name to his second novel, The Green House (1966), also inspired by a trip into Peru’s Amazonian jungle.
At 15, Vargas Llosa worked as a reporter for the Lima newspaper La Crnica, discovering an underside of crime and prostitution in the capital, which went on to feed his third novel, Conversation In The Cathedral (1969). Rebelling against his parents’ choice of the Catholic university for “blancos” (whites), he studied literature and law at San Marcos in Lima, the university “for mestizos, atheists and communists”. He was a member of an under-ground communist cell, briefly. “I was prepared to accept the most incredible idiocies but not socialist realism.”
In 1955 he eloped with his aunt Julia Urquidi when he was 19 and she 32, an alliance that brought reconciliation with his father, who thought marriage at least a “virile act”. His comic masterpiece Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) alternated the tales of a Bolivian writer of radio soap operas with his eight-year marriage, “a kind of soap opera too, full of turbulence and melodrama”.
In 1958 a trip to Paris the prize in a short story competition led to a 16-year self-imposed exile from Peru in Madrid, London and Barcelona as well as in Paris. The Time of the Hero made him famous overnight. Working for a French radio-TV network in Paris he met other writers of the boom, including Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortzar, Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Angel Asturias. He shared the enthusiasm for the 1959 Cuban revolution, then broke with Castro over the 1971 “show trial” of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla.
In 1965 Vargas Llosa married his cousin Patricia, 10 years his junior. They fell in love in Paris when she was studying at the Sorbonne. In London’s Earl’s Court they became neighbours with Cabrera Infante. Vargas Llosa would write in his tiny flat from 8am to 6pm while his family fought off “rats as big as ferrets” in the kitchen.
He taught at King’s College in the late-1960s and shared a study with Jason Wilson who found him “friendly, but quite shy, and he didn’t like to get drunk he didn’t fulfil any bohemian paradigms.” As Vargas Llosa wrote: “I have never … lived the bohemian life.”
Vargas Llosa’s early fiction excoriated the Peruvian bourgeoisie but with a sophistication inspired by Flaubert about whom he wrote a critical work, The Perpetual Orgy (1975) and Faulkner. His goal was what he called the “total novel”, addressing all aspects of Peruvian society and the effect of politics on the characters’ psyches, with multiple viewpoints and an invisible narrator. With Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) he introduced humour into his novels. On his trip to the Amazon, he had stumbled on a prostitute service ordered for a garrison in the jungle: “I tried to write it in a serious way but it was impossible. It was a great discovery.”
In 1974 Vargas Llosa and his family set up a permanent home again in Peru. A film of Captain Pantoja, which he co-directed, was banned or censored across Latin America and he clashed with the region’s worsening dictatorships. In 1977, as president of the writers’ club International PEN, he wrote an open letter of protest to the Argentinian dictator Jorge Videla. By now world famous he hosted a Lima talk show in the early 1980s. He backed the 1980-85 conservative government of Fernando Belande Terry in Peru but turned down an invitation in 1984 to become prime minister.
Across Latin America military regimes were fighting guerrilla movements such as the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, led by Abimael Guzmn (who was captured in 1992). Vargas Llosa’s novel The War of the End of the World (1981) recreated the clash between a revolutionary commune in 19th-century Brazil and the troops sent to crush it. He distrusts revolutionary utopias, tracing the roots of violence to religious and political fanaticism. His essays, collected in Making Waves (1996), chart his disenchantment with the legacy of Che Guevara as “messianic dogma”. He attacked Gnter Grass for “double standards” in backing revolutions in Latin America he would condemn in his own country.
Some thought his politics were beginning to mar his fiction. Jason Wilson sees The Real Life Of Alejandro Mayta (1984) as “loaded against the character of the failed revolutionary and homosexual”, an ageing Trotskyist. Salman Rushdie deemed the novel Vargas Llosa’s “first overtly right-wing tract”. In a 1986 lecture, Latin America: Fiction and Reality, Vargas Llosa said: “We, westernised Latin Americans have persevered in the worst habits of our forebears … We share the mentality of the conquistadors.”
Yet he has been criticised for advocating the “sacrifice” of indigenous cultures. “There are two very different cultures in Latin America, with different levels of development,” he says. “The equitable ideal would be to modernise the archaic so that most of their values and institutions survive. But that’s not been reached by any society in the world.”
His novel Death in the Andes (1993) can be read as a cry of frustration with irrationality and superstition. It came out of his first political commission, which was to investigate the killing of eight journalists in a remote Andean village in 1983. “It was set in a period when terrorism and counter-terrorism threatened to destroy the fabric of Peru, or bring a return to the tribe, to the past, to superstition, unreason, a religious approach to life, as in Afghanistan or Iran,” he says. “What we call civilisation is real but it’s also very fragile.”
For Ilan Stavans, professor of Spanish at Amherst College, Massachusetts, Vargas Llosa’s “career shows how a Europeanised man of letters looks at religiosity and mythology with suspicion and also with admiration. While Abimael Guzman wanted to return Peru to its pre-conquistador past a Maoist return to Inca empire Vargas Llosa was trying to present Peruvian society as open, cosmopolitan and attached to European values. The left wants to embrace the indigenous peoples rather than look to Europe. He’s impatient with that.” Manguel deems Death in the Andes a “racist novel”, the Andean Indians “as lifeless as … Rider Haggard’s savage Africans”. They are “portrayed as somehow deserving of their fate because they’re not capable of civilisation by which he means Western civilisation”.
“I don’t think civilisation is a European patrimony,” Vargas Llosa says. “Only democratic culture can make enemies coexist and it’s deeply rooted in many European places. But Bosnia and Kosovo are also in Europe and there’s terrorism in Spain, in Ireland. Civilisation belongs to any society or individual that adopts it.” He adds: “I think progress exists: it’s an improvement when there are equal rights for women and men, when you can vote for your rulers. Collectivist societies never have these institutions.”
For Vargas Llosa, the eroticism of his novels In Praise of the Stepmother (1988) and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997) is also an “expression of civilisation, where sex is surrounded by rituals and ceremonies; you don’t have it in primitive societies”. He was amused by a New York Times review of Don Rigoberto which saw the novel as pornography. “This American professor of literature identified more than 25 sexual perversions in the novel. I was fascinated. He read it without humour, as puritans read books.” For the author, the difference between erotica and pornography is “purely artistic: if it’s well written and persuasive it’s erotic; if it’s mediocre it becomes vulgar and pornographic”. But in Valenzuela’s view Don Rigoberto is “not pornographic but boring. It’s critical of a male perspective but it’s not erotic or sincere.” During Vargas Llosa’s political campaign his opponents smeared him as a “pornographic slanderer”.
Vargas Llosa has always said the social obligations of the Latin American writer are more onerous than those of their counterparts in Europe. He was moved to protest in 1987 against President Alan Garca’s plan to nationalise the Peruvian financial system. Vargas Llosa’s rally drew 120 000 people and became the start of a three-year presidential campaign for the Democratic Front coalition. He had death threats and abusive phone calls. His wife tried to dissuade him from running. In his memoir he concedes that she may have been right to say he was drawn by “the adventure, the illusion of living an experience of excitement and risk, of writing the great novel in real life”. Yet he maintains that he entered politics “pushed by civic and moral reasons: I thought something should be done to preserve a fragile democratic system which was collapsing because of terrorism, corruption, hyperinflation.”
Though he led the polls his initial majority was not enough to secure a mandate. In the second round Fujimori was backed by the incumbent government. “I learned that the important things in politics are not just ideas and values but also sordid manoeuvring and intrigues,” he says.
In Gott’s view “his novels had some sensitivity towards the great majority in Peru, who are mostly Indian or mestizo. But as a politician he identified himself with the oligarchic elite.” After his defeat, he was insulted in the streets with the words, “Get out, gringo”. “I was not a good politician,” he says. “It was damaging to be associated with some political parties. Fujimori presented himself as the underdog, though he was very rich.”
The loser was also criticised in Peru for leaving the country within hours of his defeat and taking up Spanish nationality. “Peruvians have made it a sport to hate Vargas Llosa,” says Stavans. Others point out that this choice was made long before and that Madrid is the crucial publishing centre for Spanish-language writers. Vargas Llosa is a self-confessed “cosmopolitan and expatriate who has always detested nationalism”. Yet while Gott sees him as a “rootless cosmopolitan in the European tradition more at home in London or Paris or Barce-lona”, Vargas Llosa calls Peru a “constant torment”, his relationship to it “more adulterous than conjugal, full of suspicion, passion and rages”.
After Fujimori’s “self-coup” in 1992 Vargas Llosa urged international sanctions against the regime. Some saw him as a traitor. “During Fujimori’s first two years I was very discreet,” he says. “My situation became very difficult: I was persona non grata in Peru.” He returned under the dictatorship only for a few days in 1995, for his mother’s funeral.
Forced to resign over corruption allegations in 2000, Fujimori fled to Japan. Though there has been a return to democracy, Vargas Llosa’s son Alvaro has fallen out with the new president, Alejandro Toledo. “They had a quarrel. He accused entrepreneur friends of the president of trying to make improper deals with the state. Now there are defamation suits against Alvaro.” But Vargas Llosa, who recently spent three months in Peru, does not agree. “There are many things to criticise, but I haven’t perceived any dirty dealings.”
The Feast of the Goat forms a belated addition to some say the pinnacle of the genre of Latin American “dictator novels” that include I the Supreme (1974), by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, and Garca Mrquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). The new book was also conceived in the mid-1970s, when Vargas Llosa was on an eight-month visit to the Dominican Republic to film Captain Pantoja. Yet it is tempting to read into it the author’s hands-on experience of Peruvian politics. “Fujimori was quite different to Trujillo a more mediocre tyrant,” he says. “His big ambition and appetite was money. What Trujillo wanted was power.” Yet he sees parallels: “As with Trujillo, Fujimori was very popular. Though dirty things were going on torture, killings and corruption his image was of a strongman who would defend people against the terrorists.”
The main subject of The Feast of the Goat is perhaps not the dictator as much as the complicity of his subjects, and the abiding temptation to choose the strongman, the caudillo. “I didn’t want to present Trujillo as a grotesque monster or brutal clown,” Vargas Llosa says. “I wanted a realist treatment of a human being who became a monster because of the power he accumulated and the lack of resistance and criticism.”
Vargas Llosa is now at work on a novel about the artist Paul Gauguin, which returns to his theme of destructive utopias. Gauguin wanted paradise on Earth, he says. “He was convinced it existed in primitive communities that Europe had destroyed: he searched in Brittany, Martinique, Panama, Tahiti … I distrust the idea that you can build a paradise here in history. That idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban. When you want paradise you produce first extraordinary idealism. But at some time, you produce hell.”
The Feast of the Goat (Faber & Faber) will be available in South Africa from next month