The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature to novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa. He is the first Peruvian – and the sixth Latin American – to win the prestigious literary accolade.
An elegant polyglot who divides his time between Lima, Barcelona and London, 74-year-old Vargas Llosa is the author of 16 novels, three short-story volumes, seven plays and over 20 works of non-fiction that include his collected journalism and literary criticism.
The Swedish Academy’s citation praises Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power” and “his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two novels considered his greatest works – The War of the End of the World (1981), which dramatises the destruction of a community led by a messianic preacher in 19th-century Brazil, and The Feast of the Goat (2000), a chilling depiction of the Dominican Republic’s ageing dictator, Rafael Trujillo.
The award of the Nobel Prize to Vargas Llosa has, so far, been met with almost unanimous ap-proval.
“Some Nobel announcements are perplexing,” said Spanish novelist Javier Marías, like Vargas Llosa a member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
“But no one will argue with this one. Or almost no one.”
Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family in the small town of Arequipa. He had an itinerant and comfortable childhood, but an introduction to the harsher realities of Peruvian society came when, aged 14, he was sent to board at the Leoncio Prado military academy in Lima.
His first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), a realistic depiction of the brutalities endured and committed by military cadets, was based on that experience. Published at a time of military rule in Peru, it was denounced as “degenerate” by army officers who staged public burnings of the book.
Vargas Llosa’s next two novels, The Green House (1965), and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) continued his grim meditations on the inner workings of power. His next work, however, signalled a change of style. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973), about prostitutes recruited by military officers to serve in the country’s far-flung regions, is a comic masterpiece.
It was followed by the hilarious Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982), based loosely on his marriage to his aunt, Julia Urquidi, 13 years his senior.
Vargas Llosa’s interest in politics was never purely literary. Like many of his Latin American contemporaries, including Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, he was an early supporter of left-wing regimes such as Fidel Castro’s, in Cuba. He alienated old friends, including García Márquez, as he became critical of Castro’s human rights abuses.
His own political ambitions led him to run for the presidency of Peru in 1990.
He stood for the Democratic Front, a right-of-centre coalition advocating market economy-oriented reforms, but was trounced by the populist independent candidate, Alberto Fujimori.
The excitement, disappointments and sheer bizarreness of that campaign are captured in Vargas Llosa’s memoir, A Fish in the Water (1993).