“AAt what precise moment did Peru mess itself up? Those words on the opening page of Conversation in the Cathedral It announced the arrival of a writer who understood that national history could become the organizing principle of fiction. At the same time that Latin America was discovering the intoxicating possibilities of magical realism – a form whose enthusiasms had an alternative relationship with revolutionary politics, obliterating the distinction between the wonderful and the possible – Mario Vargas Llosa turned instead to old-fashioned realism.
Gerald Martin suggests in this conversational but soberly analytical biography that it was a question of politics as much as sensitivity. He traces the path of a novelist who began dissecting the oligarchy with surgical precision and, over the course of half a century, happily dined among its ranks – from the hard left to the hard right, while completing one of the most spectacular political sojourns in literary history.
Yet Martín’s revisionist view is that Vargas Llosa crossed less ideological distance than is often imagined. He never really belonged to the Left. His brief flirtation was not so much with socialism as with a socialist: the dazzling, unattainable Lee Barba, whom he met at the University of San Marcos. Their undergraduate friendship developed among the dim tables of bookstores and the bohemian nightclub managed by Lee’s Communist father. Beneath the guerrilla chic, Martin finds an old mentor who believes in hierarchy in Vargas Llosa. The “factory defect”, as one university contemporary put it, was innate: Vargas Llosa had never been a “Lima posh boy”.
Vargas Llosa’s greatest novels were written under the spell of Jean-Paul Sartre, before the French philosopher’s indulgence towards the revolutionary regime ultimately alienated him. The break with Sartre in particular and the left in general occurred with the “Padilla affair” in 1971, when Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was arrested and forced to make a bizarre public confession renouncing his “counter-revolutionary” work and denouncing fellow dissidents. Vargas Llosa led an international campaign against Castro’s treatment of writers. Martin is extremely insensitive about this famous moment of generous courage. He argues that Vargas Llosa’s comparison of Castro to Stalin was highly trivial and that the campaign against Havana helped to isolate the regime precisely when the Latin American left needed it most.
Many biographies are now an exercise in rehabilitation. Happily, Martin has indeed written a critical life. An occasionally overworked Oedipal reading of its subject matters and an inexplicable fondness for the word “sexy” are minor irritants in a searing, stylish account whose real subject is not Vargas Llosa alone, but the intellectual and political milieu that made and unmade him.
Martín restores the women whom Vargas Llosa had reduced to literary raw material. His scandalous marriage at the age of 19 to his aunt, Julia Urquidi, who was 10 years his senior, resulted in Aunt Julia—and the screenwriter—of his novels, the most beautiful, and to some extent his best-loved. His own memoir, What Varguitas Didn’t Say, exposes the gap between Vargas Llosa’s light romance and the less glamorous reality of adultery and abandonment. Alas, it never troubled the bestseller lists.
Julia was ostracized by her first cousin, Patricia Llosa, who was nine years younger than her, with whom she had three children. Like the wives of many writers of her generation, she was always taking one for the team, quietly shooing him away whenever the offending child screamed: “Patriiiissia! Take this child away, I can’t tempt!”
Half a century later, she too was replaced, this time by Spanish society leader Isabel Preysler, mother of singer Enrique Iglesias, with whom the octogenarian eventually sang ‘Hola!’ The republic of letters exchanged for the pages of.
His move to England proved unexpectedly formative. Vargas Llosa settled in unswinging Cricklewood, which suited his pre-existing taste for suburban conservatism. The historian Hugh Thomas, another distinguished émigré from the left, played Virgil to Vargas Llosa’s Dante, taking him into the circle of Tory respectability and, ultimately, to Margaret Thatcher herself. He wrote about his encounter with fanboy Aradhana in an article titled The Lady Among the Wild Beasts.
The novelist who spent decades exposing the temptations of ideology proved remarkably sensitive to a new ideology. After he rejected his presidential ambitions in 1990 when Peru ran on a neoliberal ticket against Alberto Fujimori, he increasingly began courting those in power where the regime congratulates itself on its realism. Utopias, the left’s source of aspiration, became mere distortions in his later novels.
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After the 2010 Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa lent his reputation to the hard right, supporting Peru’s trigger-happy unelected ruler Dina Bolwart and Chile’s anti-gay, anti-abortion crusader José Antonio Caste; Condemning feminism as the “archenemy” of literature and treating every leftist electoral setback as a “comeback” caudillismo“
Gabriel García Márquez is the main character of the book: from magician to realist to Vargas Llosa, the man who stayed with the leftist tribe while his younger rival left it. Martin, now the biographer of both, is uniquely placed to reconstruct the most famous right hook in literary history. In 1976, Vargas Llosa allegedly punched and injured García Márquez after she accused him of crossing the line by consoling Patricia during the breakdown of their marriage.
The punch symbolized more than a personal rupture. This gave an ideological stamp. García Márquez later commented that there were “only two soups on the menu”: capitalism and socialism. Vargas Llosa turned his nose up in one and spent the rest of his life swallowing himself in the other.
