Giant of Latin American literature

Mario Vargas Llosa, who died at the age of 89 in her native Peru, was a towering figure in Latin American literature and culture, which rarely deviated from controversy.

With more than 50 works in his name, many of which were widely translated, Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, when the judges called him a “divinely gifted storyteller”. His images of authoritarianism, violence and machismism, using a rich language and images, made him a star of the literary movement of the Latin American boom that illuminated a global spotlight on the continent.

At first sympathetic to the left -wing ideas, he was disappointed with the revolutionary causes of Latin America, ultimately running unsuccessfully for the Peruvian Presidency with the Central Party in 1990.

Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 into a middle -class family in Arekipa in South Peru. After his parents split while he was a baby, he moved to Kochabamba in Bolivia with his great -grandparents. He returned to Peru at the age of 10 and six years later he wrote his first play – the escape of the Incas. He graduated from the University of Lima, studied in Spain and later moved to Paris.

His first novel, The Hero’s Time, was a charge of corruption and abuse of Peruvian Military School. Written at a time when the military in the country possessed a significant political and social power, it was published in 1962.

His strong, threatening images were convicted by several Peruvian generals. One accused Vargas llosa of having a “degenerated mind”.

He was based on the writer’s own time as a teenager at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which he described in 1990 as a “extremely traumatic experience”. His two years there made him see his country “as a violent society filled with bitterness, composed of social, cultural and racial factions in full opposition.” The school itself burned 1000 copies of the novel on its grounds, says Vargas Llosa.

His experimental second novel, The Green House (1966), was placed in the Peruvian Desert and Jungle and describes the Union of Pimples, Missionaries and Soldiers based around Bardak.

The two novels helped to open the Latin American literary movement of the boom from the 60s and 70s. The boom is characterized by experimental and explicit political works that reflect a continent in turmoil.

Its leading authors, who included Vargas Llosa’s Colombian friend and once rival Gabriel Garcia Marquez – who is a pioneer of kaleidoscopic magical realism style of writing – became the names of households and their works were read worldwide.

Known, the two authors did not talk to each other for decades after Vargas Llosa struck Garcia Marquez in the face in Mexican cinema in 1976. Reports on why Vargas Llosa struck their Colombian friend.

Garcia Marquez’s friends said the dispute revolved around Garcia Marquez’s friendship with the then wife of Vargas Llosa, Patricia, but Vargas Llosa told students at Madrid University in 2017 that he had fallen on their opposing views on Cuba and his communist leader through communist leader.

They reconciled themselves in 2007 and three years later, in 2010, Vargas Llosa was honored with the Nobel Prize – the first South American writer selected for the Literature Award after Gabriel Garcia Marquez took the honor in 1982.

Much of Vargas Llosa’s work is inseparable from instability and violence in parts of Latin America in the second half of the 20th century, as the region was experiencing waves of revolutions and military rule.

His novels conversations in the Cathedral (1969) are noted to expose the Peruvian dictatorship from 1948-56. Under Manuel, the Drya controls and ultimately ruined the lives of ordinary people.

Like many intellectuals, Vargas Llosa supported Fidel Castro, but was disappointed with the communist leader after the “Padila Affair” when the poet Heberto Padila was closed to the Cuban Government in 1971.

In 1983, Vargas Llosa was appointed president of a committee investigating the horrifying murder in a village in the Peruvian Andes of eight journalists, which became known as the slaughter in the astress.

The Peruvian officials say journalists were killed by local peasants who were mistaken for journalists for members of the Maoist brilliant guerrilla group.

The Commission’s report supported the official line, which led to fierce criticism of Vargas Llosa by those who believed that the terrible nature of the crime and the terrifying mutilations inflicted on the body were the hallmark of scandalous anti -terrorist police, not signs of “root violence.”

Moving further on the political spectrum, in 1990, Vargas Llosa was running for the Peruvian Presidency with the right of the French Democratico coalition on a neoliberal platform. He lost to Alberto Fujimori, who continued to run Peru for the next 10 years.

Despite the criticism equalized against him for the investigation of the slaughter in the surprise, Vargas Llosa continued to expose state terror and abuse of power through literature.

His novel, The Goat Festival, published in 2000, focuses on the dictator Rafael Trukhilo, who ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years until his murder in 1961. The novel won the Nobel Prize Resistance Committee on the “structures of the authorities”, and “resistance to the resistance of the individuals.

Other works were adapted to the big screen. His book Aunt Julia and the screenwriter, based on his first marriage, was adapted in 1990 in a Hollywood feature film Tomorrow.

His late work covered the figures as diverse as the Irish nationalist Roger Cele (The Dream of the Celt, 2012).

He spent the last years of his life in Peru as well as in Madrid.

The author appeared on the pages of the Spanish magazine “Gossip” living room after he left his wife at 50 in 2015 to be with Spanish Philippino Socialist Isabel Presser, the mother of the popular Latin singer Enrique Iglesias.

He also continued to attract criticism for conflicting remarks.

In 2019, he was convicted of accusing the killings of journalists in Mexico – more than 100 in the last decade – about expanding print freedom, “allowing journalists to say things that were not allowed before.” Although he also said that “drug trafficking plays an absolutely central role in all this,” some commentators believe that he did not express sympathy for the victims and their families.

And in 2018, he caused a move when he called a feminism in the Spanish newspaper El País the most decisive enemy of literature, trying to deactivate it from Machismo, many prejudices and immoralities. “

He died in Lima on April 13, surrounded by his family and “in peace”, announced his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa.

With her death, the last of the big stars of the Latin American boom has disappeared.