The Peruvian writer contributed like few others to the universal expansion of Latin America.
14ymedio, Federico Hernández Aguilar, San Salvador, 20 April 2025 — With Mario Vargas Llosa’s passing (1936-2025) the last great exponent of the so-called Latin American boom died, an extraordinary creative and editorial phenomenon that, strictly speaking, should be called the boom of the Spanish-American novel. All of its members were primarily novelists and none were originally from Brazil, Quebec or the French-speaking Caribbean, nor did they write their works in any language other than Spanish, although Julio Cortázar, who was born by chance in Belgium, wrote Les discours du Pince-Gueule (1966) in French, which was later translated into Spanish as Los discursos del Pinchajeta.
With the passing of Vargas Llosa, who died at the height of his fame, the life cycle of a host of writers who enriched the world’s literary landscape comes to an end, as their names moved from editorial obscurity to mass circulation, the thunder of advertising, critical acclaim, awards, and international tours. The protagonists themselves, however, more than once confessed their personal skepticism about the boom.
Cortázar was uncomfortable with such an onomatopoeic term in English, Gabriel García Márquez barely referred to it, and Carlos Fuentes, the only one to dedicate a book to the subject, preferred the title The New Hispanic American Novel (1969). All of them, however, left abundant testimony to the implications of the phenomenon: a break with previous language, an avant-garde update of the reality-fiction binomial, and a clear political (not merely aesthetic) commitment to the historical changes then taking place in the subcontinent.
The Peruvian, in fact, would be the first and the only one who would clamorously disenchant himself from the Cuban revolution with open criticism of the philosophical and anthropological foundations of socialism.
In 1971, Vargas Llosa commented: “What is called the boom, and which no one knows exactly what it is—I personally don’t—is a group of writers—no one knows exactly who either, since each has their own list—who, more or less simultaneously in time, acquired a certain amount of dissemination, a certain recognition from the public and critics. This can perhaps be called a historical accident. However, it was never a literary movement linked by an aesthetic, political, or moral ideology. As such, that phenomenon has passed.”
The Peruvian, in fact, would be the first and only to become blatantly disenchanted with the Cuban revolution, openly criticizing the philosophical and anthropological foundations of socialism, an aspect that would bring him numerous ideological and even personal attacks. His editor at Alfaguara, Juan Cruz, maintains that “creating misunderstandings about Vargas Llosa has always been an international sport.”
Curiously, among such numerous detractors, it is rare to find one with sufficient theoretical capacity to refute him in the realm of ideas, either because they ignore or dismiss the ideas from the outset, or because they find it difficult to contradict him based on the knowledge of liberal authors that this requires. (I will address this topic in another column.)
The fact is that Mario Vargas Llosa became, above the rest of his colleagues of the boom, the writer who would exercise the greatest influence as a media personality, from frequent guest appearances on interview programs to prestigious international columnist, passing through theater actor, sports columnist, failed film director, member of official commissions – such as the one he presided over in 1983 to investigate the massacre of journalists in Uchuraccay, (Ayacucho) – and even a jury member of the Miss Universe pageant, on whose panel he was joined, in 1982, by the actor Franco Nero and the illusionist David Copperfield.
The fact is that Mario Vargas Llosa became, above the rest of his colleagues of the boom, the writer who would exercise the greatest influence as a media personality.
The world of show business followed the Nobel Prize winner until his final years, when he made the unexpected, autumnal decision to share a pillow with socialite Isabel Preysler, a star of Spanish celebrity gossip magazines with two divorces under her belt, the mother of five children, and the widow of former minister Miguel Boyer. After this strange relationship broke up in 2022, Vargas Llosa returned to the same house with his wife, Patricia, who was by his side when he died on April 13 in Lima.
The author of The Feast of the Goat, as we know, also lived and suffered the harshness not only of political activism but of active politics. In his youth, following Jean-Paul Sartre’s postulates regarding “commitment,” he seriously adhered to the idea—”persuasive and exhilarating,” he would later say—that the world could be radically improved through empowered humanism and that literature had the obligation to contribute to this process.
In 1966, he stated: “The raison d’être of literature is protest, contradiction, and criticism. The writer has been, is, and will continue to be a malcontent. No one who agrees with the reality in which they live would undertake such a misguided and ambitious enterprise: the invention of verbal realities.” But as early as 1967, in a Letter to the Spokesperson of the Peruvian Communist Party, he argued that if a writer is “deeply committed to his vocation, he will love literature above all else.”
“The reason for literature’s existence is protest, contradiction, and criticism.”
And although between 1987 and 1990 Vargas Llosa worked diligently on a presidential candidacy that ended in a frustrating defeat, we must remember something he had written in 1983 when he published Contra viento y marea (Against Wind and Tide), his first collection of journalistic articles: “Literature, in the end, is more important than politics, which every writer should approach only to block its path, remind it of its place, and counteract its missteps.”
In short, as an imaginative and persevering builder of new realities, that is, as an essential and vital writer, Mario Vargas Llosa contributed like few others to the universal expansion of Latin America, in an unequivocal commitment to that art in which everything can be created “from the truths and lies that constitute the ambiguous human totality.”
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