Super Mario World: Remembering Peru’s Vargas Llosa

At their best, novels are great, sprawling, capacious and unruly engagements with the world that spawned them — big and ambitious juggernauts of pure imaginative invention that paradoxically comment directly on the foibles and failings of reality. That’s how the novels of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who died this week at the age of 89, functioned. Through wholly invented characters and conversations Vargas Llosa spun yarns that interrogated political corruption, military education, and authoritarian oppression.

The Faulknerian novels won him a Nobel Prize but his knowledge and curiosity about the world was so vast that it couldn’t be contained just in fiction — Vargas Llosa also churned out reams of essays and newspaper columns. And it drove him not just to write about life but to live it: he ran for the presidency of Peru, punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face, and dated Julio Iglesias’s ex-wife.

Though he benefited in the 1960s from an explosion of global interest in Latin American literature, the iconoclastic Vargas Llosa never neatly fit in with his peers (see above re: face-punching). He tended to eschew magical realism for a grittier, more grounded verisimilitude, and his politics were right-of-center enough that he sent flowers to Margaret Thatcher.

The Library provides access to a variety of his books, many of them translated by Edith Grossman; below is just a sampling.