Un Peruano Universal, The Economist

A universal Peruvian
Oct 7th 2010, 17:02 by M.R. | LONDON
IT HAD seemed inevitable that Mario Vargas Llosa was condemned to join the list of great writers never to receive the Nobel prize, while many of lesser talent but more fashionable views were honoured. So this year’s award is welcome, if overdue, recognition for the most accomplished living Latin American novelist and writer.
In its citation, the committee commends Mr Vargas Llosa for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” These themes are treated most powerfully in what are perhaps his two finest novels, written more than three decades apart. “Conversation in the Cathedral”, an early work of astonishing maturity, is set in Peru in the 1950s during a military dictatorship. “The Feast of the Goat”, published in 2000 (and reviewed by The Economist), explores the cruel regime of General Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. While novels about dictators are a staple of Latin American literature, Mr Vargas Llosa took the genre beyond political denunciation, crafting subtle studies of the psychology of absolute power and its corruption of human integrity. These are themes he returns to in his latest book, "El Sueño del Celta" (“The Dream of the Celt”), a novel about Roger Casement, an Anglo-Irish diplomat and early crusader for human rights, which is published in Spanish this month.
Born in Arequipa in southern Peru in 1936, Mr Vargas Llosa’s early works are rich with the flavours and injustices of his native country. “La Ciudad y los Perros”, whose poorly chosen title in English is “The Time of the Hero”, is a clammily claustrophobic fictional account of the author’s unhappy experience as a teenager in Lima’s Military College. His complex and contradictory feelings about Peru are a constant strand in his work, but his themes and increasingly his subjects are universal. Another recurring theme is the search for utopia, and its often tragic consequnces, political or personal, which he explores in different ways in “The War of the End of the World”, “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” and “The Way to Paradise”, a study in counterpoint of the lives of Paul Gauguin, a painter, and his Franco-Peruvian grandmother, Flora Tristán, an early feminist (reviewed by The Economist).
Mr Vargas Llosa’s prose lacks the poetic intensity of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his Colombian near-contemporary (and the last South American* writer to win the Nobel, in 1982). But he more than makes up for this with his greater intellectual depth, subtlety and authorial rigour. His books are meticulously researched and carefully crafted. He writes every morning, and corrects his manuscripts three times, using different coloured ink. His style shows the influence of Flaubert and Sartre, but also the Spanish picaresque tradition. He is extraordinarily versatile and prolific. His novels include lighter, comic works, such as the autobiographical “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” and the recent “The Bad Girl”. But he has also written plays, works of literary criticism and political essays, as well as a longstanding fortnightly column in Spain’s El País newspaper.
A youthful enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution quickly gave way in Mr Vargas Llosa to a trenchant liberalism. This often made him unpopular in Latin America. He was equally critical of Fidel Castro and of Peru’s conservative strongman, Alberto Fujimori. He abhors the nationalism that is the default tool of so many Latin American politicians, and espouses a universal humanism. His passionate belief in the cause of liberty led him into active politics. In 1990 he ran for president of Peru. Fortunately for the cause of literature, he lost. Once a polarising national figure, he is now universally respected as the country’s moral conscience. As well as a great novelist, Mr Vargas Llosa has become Latin America’s most influential liberal thinker. Now 74, he shows no sign of slowing down.