Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel-winning Peruvian novelist, dies at 89
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Apr 15
- 4 min read
By Simon Romero
Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died Sunday in Lima. He was 89.
His death was announced in a social media statement from his children, sons Álvaro and Gonzalo and daughter Morgana.
Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2010, gained renown as a young writer with slangy, blistering visions of the corruption, moral compromises and cruelty festering in Peru. He joined a cohort of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, who became famous in the 1960s as members of Latin America’s literary “boom generation.”
His distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration. After he was enrolled at the age of 14 in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Vargas Llosa turned that experience into his first novel, “The Time of the Hero” (1963), a critical account of military life.
The book was denounced by several generals, including one who claimed it was financed by Ecuador to undermine Peru’s military — all of which helped make it an immediate success.
Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, of his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.
He charted his own path as a conservative, often divisive political thinker and as a novelist who transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.
His dabbling in politics ultimately led to a run for the presidency in 1990. That race allowed him to champion the free-market causes he espoused, including the privatization of state enterprises and reducing inflation through government spending cuts and layoffs of the bloated civil service.
He led polls for much of the race but was roundly defeated by Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist of Japanese descent who later adopted many of Vargas Llosa’s policies.
Vargas Llosa had a passion for fiction, but he started out in journalism. As a teenager, he was a night reporter for La Crónica, a Lima daily, chronicling an underworld of dive bars, crime and prostitution. Elements of that experience fed into his 1969 novel, “Conversation in the Cathedral,” a depiction of Peru’s malaise under Gen. Manuel Odría’s military dictatorship during the 1950s, a book that is often considered his masterwork.
And although he often wrote articles for newspapers in Europe and the United States, he experienced a journalistic rebirth in the 1990s as a columnist for the newspaper El País in Spain, where he had been granted citizenship.
His fortnightly column, “Piedra de toque,” or “Touchstone,” was syndicated in Spanish-language newspapers throughout Latin America and the United States. It gave him a platform for topics such as the reemergence of populism in the Andes, the art of Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin, and vociferous support for the state of Israel, a frequent theme in his political writing.
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, in southern Peru, and spent much of his early childhood in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba with his mother, Dora Llosa, and his grandparents. They made up a middle-class family of modest means but patrician ancestry, and he was told his father was dead.
His parents had actually separated months before he was born, and his father, Ernesto Vargas, who worked for the airline Panagra, took an assignment abroad and requested a divorce from his wife.
They reunited in Peru when their son was 10. But chafing at the discipline meted out by his father, the boy was soon sent to the military academy in Lima. After that experience, at the age of 19, Vargas Llosa eloped with Julia Urquidi Illanes, his uncle’s sister-in-law, who was 29.
The turbulent marriage shocked his family and inspired him to write “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.” Published in 1977 and one of his best-known novels translated into English, the book describes the comedic travails of Marito Varguitas, a young law student and aspiring writer who falls in love with his aunt against a backdrop of radio soap operas.
Urquidi responded to the book with a critical memoir of her time with Vargas Llosa, “What Varguitas Did Not Say,” detailing their threadbare and tension-filled years together in Europe. They divorced in 1964, and Vargas Llosa married Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children.
They separated in 2015 after 50 years of marriage when he confirmed his romantic involvement with Isabel Preysler, the former wife of singer Julio Iglesias. Vargas Llosa and Preysler, who was born in the Philippines and became a high-profile socialite in Spain, separated in 2022.
He is survived by his sons Álvaro, a writer, and Gonzalo, a representative for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and a daughter, Morgana, a photographer.
Although deciphering Peru dominated much of his work, Vargas Llosa lived outside the country for long stretches. In the 1960s, in Paris, he worked as a translator and wrote news bulletins for Agence France-Presse to make ends meet, and later settled into a writing life in Barcelona, Spain, before returning to Peru in the 1970s.
Although he could write elegantly about anywhere, it was Peru that held for him a special fascination, mixed, he once wrote, with “suspicion, passion and rages,” even a hatred “steeped in tenderness.”
“You know that Herman Melville called Lima the strangest, saddest city,” Vargas Llosa, referring to a passage from “Moby Dick,” told an interviewer from The New York Times in 1989, when he seemed unable to detach himself from literature and introspection even in the heat of his campaign for president.
“Why?” Vargas Llosa said. “The fog and drizzle.”
Then he added, laughing, “I am not so sure that the fog and the drizzle are Lima’s big problems.”
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