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“AWhen did the country of Peru get confused? Those words are on the first page of Conversation in the Cathedral announced the arrival of a writer who knew that the history of the world could be the basis for organizing fictional stories. At a time when Latin America found the intoxicating potential of magic – a form whose happiness had a selective relationship with revolutionary politics, creating a gap between the extraordinary and the possible – Mario Vargas Llosa took a break for the old reality instead.
It was a question of wisdom as much as politics, Gerald Martin shows in this interesting but enlightening biography. He follows the path of the author who began by dividing the oligarchy directly from surgery and ended up eating happily among his groups, completing the most impressive move in political history – from the left to the hard right, in half a century.
However, Martin’s revisionist point is that Vargas Llosa crossed a shorter distance than he thought. He was not really a leftist. His brief courtship was not so much a socialist as a socialist: the beautiful, improbable Lea Barba, whom he met at San Marcos University. Their first-degree academic relationship took place between the bookstores and the smoking tables of a bohemian nightclub run by Lea’s communist father. Under the guise of gangs, Martin finds in Vargas Llosa an old patrician confidante who believes in leadership. The “factory defect”, as one university student says, was hereditary: Vargas Llosa never stopped being a “Lima posh boy”.
Vargas Llosa’s main works were written under the guise of Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher before his anti-revolutionary activities ostracized him. A break with Sartre in particular and the extreme left came in 1971 with the “Padilla affair”, when the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was arrested and forced to make a terrible public confession to abandon his “anti-revolutionary” work and criticize his fellow critics. Vargas Llosa led an international campaign against Castro’s treatment of writers. Martin isn’t too concerned about this happy moment of relaxed bravado. He argues that Vargas Llosa’s comparison of Castro to Stalin was exaggerated and that the anti-Havana campaign helped to sanctify the government at a time when Latin America had lost its will.
Most biographies are now a work of revision. Fortunately, Martin recorded a very difficult life. The frequent reading of articles about his subject and the unexplained love of the word “interesting” are a little disappointing in a searching, sophisticated account whose real subject is not just Vargas Llosa but the intellectuals and politicians who made him and created him.
Martin restores the women that Vargas Llosa reduced to literature. His scandalous marriage at the age of 19 to his aunt, Julia Urquidi, 10 years his senior, became Aunt Julia and the Writer – the best-looking, most beloved of his books. His own documentary, What Varguitas Didn’t Say reveals the contrast between Vargas Llosa’s breezy romance and the unpleasant reality of adultery and abandonment. Unfortunately, it never cracked the bestseller list.
Julia was abandoned for Patricia Llosa, her first cousin, nine years older, who had three children. Like many women writers of her generation, she always took the team, quietly chasing the annoying pram every time she shouted: “Patriiiicia!
After 100 years, he was also replaced, this time by the group of Spanish doyenne Isabel Preysler, mother of the singer Enrique Iglesias, with whom the octogenarian finally exchanged letters of the republic of the pages of Hola!.
His move to England was unexpectedly encouraging. Vargas Llosa settled in the unsettled Cricklewood, which resonated with the pre-existing taste of rural conservatism. Historian Hugh Thomas, another notable guest from the left, played Virgil to Vargas Llosa’s Dante, escorting him to Tory dignitaries and, eventually, to Margaret Thatcher herself. She chronicled her experiences with fanboy adoration in a piece called The Lady Among the Wild Beasts.
A writer who had spent years uncovering the appeals of the public mind was strangely attracted to new things. After Peru renounced his presidential ambitions when he ran for the presidential ticket against Alberto Fujimori in 1990, he became popular in circles where power prides itself on its authenticity. Utopias, the source of desire on the left, became pathological in his later fiction.
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After the 2010 Nobel prize, Vargas Llosa paid his respects to the hard right, supporting Peru’s unelected president Dina Boluarte and Chile’s anti-gay, anti-abortion José Antonio Kast; criticizing feminism as a “powerful enemy” of literature, and seeing any electoral change as a “return to caudillism.”
Gabriel García Márquez is the figure of the book: a magician to the real Vargas Llosa, a man who became a leftist tribe when his younger rival left. Martin, now the biographer of bothit was specially placed to recreate the most famous hook in history. In 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez after accusing him of overstepping the mark by comforting Patricia during the breakup of their marriage.
The punch was more than a human break. It printed one of the ideas. García Márquez later said that there were “only two soups in the diet”: capitalism and socialism. Vargas Llosa turned his nose up and spent the rest of his life gratifying himself elsewhere.
