Literature: what is Vargas Llosa's legacy?
The Peruvian-Spanish winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa has died aged 89. A controversial figure, not only for his literary work, Vargas Llosa was also politically active and against dictatorships in South America. In 1990 he ran for the Peruvian presidency on a liberal economic programme but lost the runoff to Alberto Fujimori. From 1990 to 2023 he wrote regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País.
Brilliant, contradictory and independent
You didn't have to agree with him but you had to read him, writes El País:
“His novels traversed the terrain of moral freedom and the ambition of our contradictions - many saw him as a left-wing author - while his political analyses and public interventions placed him more on liberal conservative terrain. That was the contradiction of this genius. ... He was never cowardly or lukewarm when it came to acting as an intellectual: he broke away from Castrism in the late 1960s when most intellectuals remained faithful to this obstructed utopia, and maintained his own independent judgement. ... You didn't have to agree with Vargas Llosa. But you had to read his columns and novels.”
Admiration and aversion
In El Periódico de Catalunya, author and politician Pilar Rahola describes her ambivalent relationship with the deceased:
“Is it possible to admire a writer's work and at the same time detest him as a person? ... Vargas Llosa developed a fierce hatred of the Catalan identity and became the mouthpiece of an aggressive, centralist Spanish nationalism. Politically he was an extremist, even in his home country. ... What remains of Vargas Llosa, beyond his sometimes miserable and shady biography, are literary monuments such as Conversation in the Cathedral or The City and the Dogs, for which he won a Nobel Prize. ... A creative legacy of great literary quality that sheds light on the human abysses and rocks the reader's soul. ”
A cross between Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo
Spanish writer Javier Cercas recalls in Libération Vargas Llosa's stylistic complexity and public appearances:
“Mario Vargas Llosa once said that in his youth he dreamt of being a French writer. And if I now had to summarise for a French reader what he meant for our culture, I would say he was a cross between Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo. He had all of Flaubert's obsessive discipline and extremely formal sophistication (along with Faulkner, who was ultimately his favourite writer). And he had Victor Hugo's extraordinary ambition and overwhelming public presence. In any case, it's a challenge to each and every reader to comprehend the stature of this man.”