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“At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Those words on the opening page of Conversation in the Cathedral announced the arrival of a writer who understood that national history could become the organising principle of fiction. At precisely the moment when Latin America was discovering the intoxicating possibilities of magical realism – a form whose exuberance had an elective affinity with revolutionary politics, collapsing the distinction between the marvellous and the possible – Mario Vargas Llosa plumped for old-fashioned realism instead.
It was a question of sensibility as much as politics, Gerald Martin suggests in this chatty yet coolly analytical biography. He traces the path of a novelist who began by dissecting oligarchy with surgical precision and ended happily dining among its ranks, completing one of literary history’s most spectacular political migrations – from the hard left to the hard right, over the course of half a century.
Yet Martin’s revisionist point is that Vargas Llosa crossed a shorter ideological distance than is often imagined. He never truly belonged to the left. His brief flirtation was not with socialism so much as with a socialist: the dazzling, unattainable Lea Barba, whom he met at San Marcos University. Their undergraduate comradeship unfolded between bookshops and the smoky tables of a bohemian nightclub managed by Lea’s communist father. Beneath the guerrilla chic, Martin finds in Vargas Llosa an old patrician confidence in hierarchy. The “factory defect”, as one university contemporary put it, was congenital: Vargas Llosa never ceased to be a “Lima posh boy”.
Vargas Llosa’s greatest novels were written under Jean-Paul Sartre’s spell, before the French philosopher’s indulgence towards revolutionary regimes finally alienated him. The break with Sartre in particular and the left in general came in 1971 with the “Padilla affair”, when the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was arrested and compelled to perform a grotesque 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 strikingly unsentimental about this celebrated moment of liberal courage. He argues that Vargas Llosa’s comparison of Castro with Stalin was wildly overdrawn and that the campaign against Havana helped isolate the regime at precisely the moment the Latin American left most needed it.
Many biographies are now exercises in rehabilitation. Happily, Martin has written a genuinely critical life. The occasional overworked oedipal reading of his subject’s affairs and an inexplicable fondness for the word “sexy” are minor irritants in a searching, stylish account whose real subject is not merely Vargas Llosa but the intellectual and political milieux that made and unmade him.
Martin restores the women whom Vargas Llosa reduced to literary raw material. His scandalous marriage at 19 to his aunt-by-marriage, Julia Urquidi, 10 years his senior, became Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter – the sunniest, and by some distance the best loved, of his novels. Her own memoir, What Varguitas Didn’t Say exposes the gap between Vargas Llosa’s breezy romance and the less charming reality of adultery and abandonment. Alas, it never troubled the bestseller lists.
Julia was discarded for Patricia Llosa, his first cousin, nine years his junior, with whom he had three children. Like so many writers’ wives of her generation, she was forever taking one for the team, quietly spiriting away the offending pram whenever he bellowed: “Patriiiicia! Take this baby away, I can’t woooork!”
Half a century later, she too was replaced, this time by the Spanish society doyenne Isabel Preysler, the mother of the singer Enrique Iglesias, with whom the octogenarian finally exchanged the republic of letters for the pages of ¡Hola!.
His move to England proved unexpectedly formative. Vargas Llosa settled in unswinging Cricklewood, which suited a pre-existing taste for suburban conservatism. The historian Hugh Thomas, another distinguished émigré from the left, played Virgil to Vargas Llosa’s Dante, escorting him into the circles of Tory respectability and, eventually, to Margaret Thatcher herself. He wrote up the encounter with fanboy adoration in a piece titled The Lady Among the Wild Beasts.
The novelist who spent decades exposing the seductions of ideology proved remarkably susceptible to a new one. After Peru rejected his presidential ambitions when he ran on a neoliberal ticket against Alberto Fujimori in 1990, he increasingly revelled in precisely those circles where power congratulates itself upon its realism. Utopias, sources of aspiration on the left, became mere pathologies in his later fictions.
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After the 2010 Nobel prize, Vargas Llosa increasingly lent his prestige to the hard right, backing Peru’s trigger-happy unelected ruler Dina Boluarte and Chile’s anti-gay, anti-abortion crusader José Antonio Kast; denouncing feminism as literature’s “staunchest enemy,” and treating every leftward electoral twitch as a “return to caudillismo.”
Gabriel García Márquez is the book’s foil: the magician to Vargas Llosa’s realist, the man who stayed with the leftist tribe while his lesser rival abandoned it. Martin, now the biographer of both, is uniquely placed to reconstruct the most famous right hook in literary history. In 1976, Vargas Llosa floored García Márquez with a punch after allegedly accusing him of overstepping the mark by comforting Patricia during the collapse of their marriage.
The punch marked more than a personal rupture. It sealed an ideological one. García Márquez later remarked that there were only “two soups on the menu”: capitalism and socialism. Vargas Llosa turned up his nose at one and spent the rest of his life gorging himself on the other.
English (US) ·