Writer, Nobel laureate, and sometime Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa died last week at the age of eighty-nine. He was the last surviving member of the “Boom,” a dazzling generation of Latin American novelists who made their name in Europe in the 1960s and ’70s, and included Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Argentina’s Julio Cortazar, Paraguay’s Augusto Roa Bastos, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like all the Boom writers, Vargas Llosa was influenced by the French masters: Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, and Flaubert. From them, he learned to think of the novel as a sprawling canvas, a vast survey of political and social drama. The epigram to Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa’s greatest work, comes from Balzac: “The novel is the private history of nations.”
In his many books exploring the “private life” of his native Peru, Vargas Llosa depicts political struggle as tragic, ironic, and beautiful. In his wonderful historical novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, for example, Vargas Llosa tells the quixotic story of a failed coup in Lima in 1958, the first attempt at a Marxist revolution in Latin America. The novelist-narrator, a stand-in for Vargas Llosa, searches for the revolutionary Alejandro Mayta, but never quite finds him. What we learn of Mayta is mostly filtered through the testimony of his ex-wife, former comrades, and an old Communist-turned-neoliberal think-tanker. Mayta’s mysterious opacity, the novel suggests, is tied to the obscure origins of the revolutionary impulse itself. This impulse owes as much to vanity as to generosity, deriving its force from a personal search for wholeness as well as an altruistic desire for justice. For true believers like Mayta, the trauma of a failed revolution can never be fully processed as comedy or tragedy. It lingers in the memory like a dream deferred, and only the novelist can provide a modicum of closure. When it was published in 1984, Mayta was dismissed by Vargas Llosa’s critics as a reactionary tale by a man who had shifted his allegiance from Marxism and socialism in the 1960s to liberalism and capitalism in the 1970s. Vargas Llosa replied that Mayta was in fact his “most literary” book, even if the critics could only see a “political diatribe.”
Vargas Llosa’s approach to politics in his fiction was bound to upset those who preferred novels that advanced a political cause. Vargas Llosa’s only contribution to social progress was the indirect contribution of the artist. His talent lay in depicting human beings possessed by political idealism. His novels captured the wars, dictators, heroes, and victims of Peruvian history, but there were also novels devoted to other times and places, like The War of the End of the World, which concerns the Canudos War in nineteenth-century Brazil and The Feast of the Goat, about Rafael Trujillo, who tyrannized the Dominican Republic for almost three decades.
If Vargas Llosa’s literary treatment of political themes annoyed some critics, his take on culture and identity—one he shared with all the Boom writers—was more controversial still. For the Boom writers, culture was at once something rooted to a place and universal: Vargas Llosa could plausibly call himself both Peruvian and European, and aspired to be a Latin American contributor to world literature. (He is among the few Latin American authors honored with a Pleiade edition.) Like the proverbial fish who doesn’t know the meaning of “water,” Vargas Llosa claimed to have discovered his Latin American identity only after he moved to Paris in 1960. Once removed from his native habitat, the contrast between himself and his surroundings made his own character easier for him to see. Vargas Llosa learned his craft in Paris, enthralled by the golden age of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. But his early fiction is all about the Peru of his childhood and youth.
Vargas Llosa’s eurocentrism, especially his francophilia, were common among the Latin American bourgeoisie of his time. (You can still encounter traces of it—my mother, for example, still refers to a nightclub as a boîte.) Spain may have been the imperial motherland, but it was France that represented the pinnacle of art and culture. There’s even a word in Spanish for francophiles like Vargas Llosa: afrancesado, one who becomes French by choice. But for him, as for the rest of the Boom, the ambition to associate oneself with the universality that France symbolized was not in tension with the desire to tell the story of Latin America. On the contrary, it was a point of pride that Latin America should take its rightful place in la cultural universal, as they called it.
The Boom writers were able to reconcile this plainly elitist cultural attitude with left-wing politics. Garcia Marquez was honored throughout Europe while he lived in Castro’s Cuba. Julio Cortazar complained that “Boom” was an English word—the language of yanqui imperialists—and he donated the rights of one of his books to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But he was also an aesthete who attacked telurismo, the regionalist and indigenist tendencies in Latin American literature, which he dismissed as provincial and proto-nationalistic. No one, Cortazar wrote, “will get very far with these regional hangups,” just as the Boom writers “would [not] be worth much if they renounced their condition as Latin Americans and joined, more or less parasitically, any European literature.” As late as 2021, Vargas Llosa defended Cortazar’s polemic against telurismo.
Unlike Garcia Marquez and Cortazar, however, in the 1970s Vargas Llosa broke ranks with the left. It was the 1959 Cuban Revolution that had converted the Boom writers to Marxism: “For my generation…what happened in Cuba was decisive, an ideological ‘before’ and ‘after.’” And it was the militarization of the Cuban Revolution in the late sixties, as well as the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla, that caused Vargas Llosa to turn away from the left. He would denounce the Cuban “concentration camps, where homosexuals, counterrevolutionaries, and common criminals were thrown together,” and lose many friends.
But Vargas Llosa’s break with the left deprived him of the political counterbalance to his cultural elitism. Effectively, he exchanged France for the Anglosphere, and replaced the ideal of a universal culture with that of a global market. In the 1980s, Vargas Llosa lived in the United Kingdom, absorbed the works of Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, and other classical liberals, and became a devotee of Margaret Thatcher. (He was less impressed by Ronald Reagan.) “Little by little,” he wrote, “I came to understand that the ‘formal freedoms’ of so-called bourgeois democracy were not mere show, behind which was hidden the exploitation of the poor by the rich, but rather the frontier between human rights…and a repressive and authoritarian system.” These convictions blossomed into a second career: Mario Vargas Llosa became a center-right politician and ran for president of Peru in 1990, losing in the runoff.
As he got older, Vargas Llosa lamented the decline of education and high culture, along with other depredations of global consumer capitalism—though he never described them in those terms. His columns for the Madrid newspaper El País, and his collection of essays, Notes on the Death of Culture, are wistful protests against cultural decline. What he lacked was a sense of how politics could stem that decline. He stuck to the standard ideas of the center-right, which he occasionally expressed with a hint of the old revolutionary fervor of his youth. “Equality of opportunity is a profoundly liberal principle,” he wrote in 2018, “even if the small gangs of intolerant and often racist liberal economists, unworthy of the name, deny it.” There is nothing wrong with Vargas Llosa’s ideal of a universal culture to which particular national experiences contribute. But reverence for culture and the arts is not, by itself, a viable politics, and finally leads nowhere unless it is combined with a strong commitment to distributive justice and institutional reform.
In his final years, Vargas Llosa supported politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Keiko Fujimori in Peru—populists as distant politically from the neoliberal Vargas Llosa of the 1980s as they were from the leftist Vargas Llosa of the 1960s. But just as surprisingly perhaps, he also wrote admiringly about Pope Benedict XVI. A crucial element missing from Vargas Llosa’s idea of Latin American identity had been Catholicism. In his youth, he traded his faith for Marxism. This is why it’s curious that, when the pope visited Madrid in 2011, the lifelong atheist Vargas Llosa wrote: “Believers and unbelievers should be happy that in these days in Madrid, God seemed to exist, Catholicism seemed to be the only and true religion.”
No doubt Vargas Llosa was attracted to Benedict the intellectual—the man whose encyclicals are full of quotes from Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin. In 2013, Vargas Llosa wrote that Benedict’s resignation, and his seeming powerlessness and solitude, gave “a disturbing glimpse of how at odds our era is with everything that represents spiritual life, concern for ethical values, and a vocation for culture and ideas.” Catholicism might have given Vargas Llosa a new framework with which to reconcile the universal and particular, the political and the artistic, Latin America and Europe, along with all the other contradictions of his busy and fruitful life. But by the end of it, he could only admire the Church from a rueful distance.
