On Reading Mario Vargas Llosa

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
Hippocrates

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
Mario Vargas Llosa


I first read Mario Vargas Llosa’s La tía Julia y el escribidor twenty-three years ago. I fell completely in love with the novel, and that after reading only a few pages. I was particularly taken with its remarkable display of the author’s sense of humor.

La tía Julia was not my introduction to Vargas Llosa. I had previously read La ciudad y los perros and La casa verde—and these formidable works had already convinced me that the Peruvian was a master writer.

But my delight in reading La tía Julia stemmed from discovering that Mario Vargas Llosa was also a formidable comic writer. The two other novels I had read were dark, somber, and humorless portraits of Perú. But while reading La tía Julia I was astounded at Vargas Llosa’s ability to place his characters in comically absurd situations, and at precisely the right moment. His expert manipulation of the novel’s structure made me shake my head in wonder—while laughing out loud as well—many, many times.

Since La tía Julia y el escribidor, the Peruvian author has written other books that highlight his command over humorous writing—most notably the novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and the plays La señorita de Tacna and Kathie y el hipopótamo. But I’m still stunned by his unsettling literary explorations into the murkier side of Latin American politics as La guerra del fin del mundo, Lituma en los Andes and La fiesta del chivo. And the latter is, without doubt, my favorite Vargas Llosa novel—a chilling political thriller based on the assassination of one of the cruelest dictators in the history of the Americas: Rafael Trujillo.

In Vargas Llosa’s literary universe time tends to collapse. Present and past ceaselessly overlap as the characters’ lives and recollections crisscross until eventually they merge to become one in the same. Yet, where one would expect this apparent temporal chaos to result in a complex, nearly impenetrable narrative, Vargas Llosa’s works invariably flow smoothly. He never loses his readers, and his stories serve to illustrate that, ultimately, we are the sum of every act of our lives.

Because of this, every time I read one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s works—and he is skilled in every literary genre with the exception of poetry—I’m obliged to acknowledge that I’m in the presence of a master of the craft of writing.