Mario Vargas Llosa’s demons

He won the Nobel Prize at last. But will his reputation survive his scandalous private life?

Illustration by Carlo Giamberresi

“Is it mean-spirited to grub around for [the] human frailties of a genius amidst the fireworks and fiestas” with which the world fetes him? This cunning epigraph to Gerald Martin’s forensic biography of Mario Vargas Llosa is answered by the book’s subject, who penned those words about Brecht: “Not if the genius… wished not only to be a good writer but a… lord of political and moral questions.” Did Vargas Llosa wish to direct consciences in this way?

The Nobel laureate in literature, who died last April aged 89, was the youngest novelist of the 1960s Latin American Boom. His ostensible political swing from revolutionary to “radical liberal” entailed defeat in a presidential bid in his native Peru in 1990 – on a platform of Andean Thatcherism. When I interviewed him at his home in Knightsbridge a dozen years later, Vargas Llosa laughed without apparent bitterness at the “terrible mistake” of his candidacy, which he could not regret: “I learned a lot about Peru, about politics and about myself.”

Plumbing the autobiographical wells of Vargas Llosa’s fiction, Martin’s irreverent, myth-busting, at times barbed biography inspects the largely un-self-examined relationship between the novelist’s politics and his writing. Though not strictly authorised, the project, which took off after the Nobel was awarded to Vargas Llosa in 2010, gained its subject’s cooperation and some impressive confidants, including Gabriel García Márquez (also the subject of a biography by Martin). But in a telling photograph included in the book, a stern Vargas Llosa wags an admonishing finger at his biographer who laughs, unabashed, in his face.

Vargas Llosa’s life began with a whopping lie. Born in 1936 in Arequipa, a high-altitude “White City” built from dazzling volcanic stone, he moved a year later to Bolivia with his mother’s Llosa family, who told him his father was dead. When he was ten and back in Peru, his mother reconciled with Ernesto Vargas, a Peruvian officer in the Argentine merchant navy. Ernesto took to beating his spoiled son. It later transpired the man was still married to his second wife. Martin tackles the unravelling lie with Vargas Llosa’s own dualist technique. Just as the latter’s novels would frequently interweave contrasting narrative strands, Martin charts the boy’s cosseted innocence, then his shocked hindsight, in successive opening chapters. He had “ten ostensibly idyllic years without a father followed by ten brutal years with a tyrannical father”. It remains in question whether he was even born at the Llosa family home in Arequipa (since 2014, a museum, where I encountered his speaking hologram) or, as is whispered locally, in a hotel – the Llosas having rejected their pregnant daughter. Was hers a shotgun wedding? Vargas Llosa “appears never to have looked” for the truth, preferring in his memoir A Fish in the Water (1993) to scapegoat his father’s “social inferiority” complex rather than blame his mother’s family for the humiliating deceptions of his early life.

Mario’s parents were “certified as white” in a stratified country. Until independence in 1821, Peru was the viceroyal heart of Spain’s South American empire, populated mainly by “Quechua Indians in traditional native attire, or mixed-race citizens known as cholos and cholas”. In the Llosa household, despite “colonial airs and graces”, were two cholo “orphans”, at least one of whom was the “illegitimate” son of Mario’s uncle Jorge: “His status was in-between the family and the servants but closer to the servants.” Martin, who has more time for the self-made Ernesto than the snobby Llosas reliant on social connections, skewers Vargas Llosa’s tendency to blame Peru for his family’s moral failings.

Cadet school, a spell as a journalist on the crime beat, and travels to Madrid and Paris fed brilliant early novels. Lima’s military academy, Vargas Llosa had told me, was “Peruvian society in miniature… It was an explosive climate in which everybody was prejudiced, with tremendous tension and violence.” In his first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), the academy becomes a brutal microcosm of General Manuel Odría’s 1948-56 military dictatorship – though Martin debunks a legend that copies were burned in the school grounds.

A hyper-realist rather than a magic realist, Vargas Llosa was influenced by Flaubert, Sartre, even Arthur Miller. His debut play, The Flight of the Inca (1952), was a “Faulknerian drama” even before he had read the master. His ignorance of his own continent’s literature was punctured by reading Borges and Bioy Casares in Buenos Aires’s Sur magazine. He glimpsed the marvellous realism of the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier. For Martin, while Vargas Llosa was “masquerading as the coolest of realists”, he was “as turbulent, as obsessive and as imaginative… as Balzac”. He “reflected almost nothing outside of his own mind” – a “masterful realist illusion” sustained over 60 years.

“One has to write as a galley slave rowed, morning, afternoon and evening, especially if you are a writer from an underdeveloped country,” Vargas Llosa wrote. His iron discipline and “sheer desire to win”, in Martin’s words, trucked no bohemianism. Yet he described novel writing thus: “I’m on the verge of madness: at the typewriter I feel ill temper, palpitations, hatred, disgust, vomit, vertigo.” Martin deems him “bourgeois on the surface and Byronic” beneath.

At 19, he married his aunt Julia, sister-in-law of his uncle and ten years his senior (not 13 years as in his memoir) – the basis for his gloriously comic, and most popular, novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977). He abandoned her to marry his first cousin, ten years his junior. The biography portrays Patricia, daughter of Vargas Llosa’s favourite uncle and substitute father, Lucho, as practically his sister. Lucho’s distraught wife, Olga, despaired to one of Vargas Llosa’s friends, “First he marries my sister. Then he divorces her. Now he wants to marry my daughter. It’s intolerable.” He emerges here as a cynical, hypocritical love rat, who lured his wife Julia back merely as cover for a scandalous tryst with Patricia, technically his niece.

In Martin’s view, the novel The Green House (1966) was fuelled by his “incessant, perverse, sadistic and often pornographic fantasies about his Lima Lolita”. It was written alongside torrid love letters to the teenage Patricia – which the couple destroyed – and its “literary elaboration of the brothel… is unlikely to appeal to feminists”, Martin notes with understatement. In it, three teenage girls, abducted and raped, “come round to liking it”. Just as questionable is Vargas Llosa’s view of novel writing as impelled by libido. In The Feast of the Goat (2000), which portrays the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, the narrative propulsion towards a rape, in which the reader is swept along as voyeur, marred for me a near masterpiece that would have been fit to join the “dictator novels” of García Márquez and the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos.

Vargas Llosa attended university in Lima with “cholos, atheists and communists”, but was, Martin argues, more a “weathervane” than revolutionary. The Peruvian author Héctor Béjar nailed him as a “classic pituco limeño (Lima posh boy)”, who “looks down his nose at people”. While Western critics have lauded his anti-authoritarian and free-speech stances, this biography is more sceptical. Vargas Llosa seldom criticised US foreign policy – even after the CIA-sponsored coup in 1973 against a democratically elected socialist president in Chile. Yet, “to be taken seriously by intellectuals from his own continent”, he paid lip service to Castro’s Cuba. His break with it in the early 1970s divorced him from Boom rivals. The famous punch that floored García Márquez in Mexico City in 1976 (they never spoke again) may have been a caddish assault triggered by the Colombian’s alleged behaviour towards Patricia. But it also flagged a political shift. Vargas Llosa’s novel The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), stacked against its failed leftist revolutionary, was a repudiation of a former self.

Vargas Llosa’s ascendancy with the “towering literary achievement” of Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), coincided with the eclipse of his only serious rival as Peru’s pre-eminent 20th-century novelist, José María Arguedas, who died by suicide the same year. Arguedas was scourged for identifying with Andean Amerindians, the country’s indigenous majority, who were never fully embraced as part of Peru’s cultural identity. For Vargas Llosa’s biographer, “anti-Indian postures” remain core to his writing. In 1983, with civilians caught between Shining Path’s Maoist insurgency and equally brutal counter-insurgency troops, he accepted a government commission to investigate the killing of eight Lima journalists by Andean villagers. His report – based on barely a day’s visit – was accused of whitewashing state culpability. Martin says it blamed the peasants’ “pre-Hispanic ignorance” (the report refers to their “atavistic” culture) without heed to military pressure on them to kill strangers who might be guerrillas.

I read Death in the Andes (1993), written after his presidential defeat, as a cry of rage and frustration at the primitivism of highlanders – who had failed to vote him in. That novel, Vargas Llosa told me, was “set in a period in which terrorism and counterterrorism threatened to… bring a return to the tribe, to the past, to superstition… What we call civilisation is… fragile; underground, the old demons are still alive.” Yet these “old demons” are fellow Peruvians, and the inability to step outside his Europeanised milieu and into their shoes may have cost this one-time advocate of the total novel an even greater legacy. Martin’s verdict: “Technically and even historically, he could have been Tolstoy, or even Hugo; spiritually he could not.”

After ranging from such subjects as the artist Paul Gauguin and the Irish nationalist Roger Casement, Vargas Llosa returned in his final novel to present-day Peru, now published in Adrian Nathan West’s English translation as I Give You My Silence. Its protagonist, Toño Azpilcueta, a Peruvian folk-music journalist, is enraptured by a guitar virtuoso, the cholo Lalo Molfino, who dies young. In a quest to tell his story, with the help of the priest who rescued the infant Lalo from a rubbish heap, this (second-rate) author writes a history of Peru through the creole vals (waltz), which is presented in the narrative’s alternate chapters.

Vargas Llosa satirises what he called the “total novel”: Toño’s book becomes a “doorstop, a labyrinth” from which “he’d left nothing out”. Comic melodrama (he visits a psychiatrist and is carted off in an ambulance) undercuts his utopian vision. Although Toño sees creole music with its mestizo input as a unifying force in his riven country, he shares deep-seated prejudices: he is horrified by a “darkness in his country”, represented by “witches and shamans” and “naive, ignorant people”.

A talented mestizo plucked from a rubbish dump might be a spectre from Vargas Llosa’s own childhood – a shadow cousin, neither family nor servant. Yet this genius’s limitations perhaps lie in just those shadows where his imagination refused to go. What is termed in his final novel the “long yawn of three centuries of colonial life” was for many an unending holocaust. It diminishes his spectacular oeuvre that their perspective was not given voice.

Maya Jaggi is a writer and critic, and the outgoing chair of independent judges for the EBRD Literature Prize

[Further reading: In Italy, everything is a family affair]