Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025)

It's a fool's errand to try to be succinct about Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday. Does one talk about the "giant" of literature that he indisputably was (both the BBC and the Guardian use that word in their obits) or about the increasingly grotesque political stances he came to adopt in the name of free-market "liberalism," an ideology that seemed to blind him to the fascist tendencies of Latin American figures of the extreme right like Javier Milei and Jair Bolsonaro? Does one talk about his spirited advocacy for other writers, including those — like his friend Julio Cortázar — who were firmly on the left, or engage, as some have done, in ad hominem attacks on his family life? For better or worse, there has been no comparable figure in the US. He was an inexhaustible novelist, literary and cultural critic, essayist, and — notably — candidate for president of Peru. (As much as I differ politically with Vargas Llosa, it's hard to believe that he would have been a worse president than the man who defeated him, Alberto Fujimori.)

I took a quick look on my shelves this morning and counted about thirty volumes of his work, in Spanish or in translation or both, including a few major books that I've never quite gotten around to (La casa verde, for one). Some I have no inclination to re-read, but nothing can change my opinion that Conversation in the Cathedral is one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, a work so ambitious in conception and sophisticated in technique as to be nearly impossible to account for. Few funnier novels have come out of Latin America than Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and even a relatively late work like El sueño del Celta (from 2010) shows an admirable humanism and mastery of narrative. Perhaps now that he's dead we can leave the unhappy aspects to his biographers and appreciate the excellence of his best work for what it is.