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Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist and essayist. Vargas Llosa is considered one of Latin America's leading novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation. He has continued to write prolifically, and is considered to have had a greater international impact and world-wide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom.

Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral. His novels span many literary genres, including comedy, murder mystery, history, and political thriller. Several, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, have been adapted as feature films (the latter as Tune in Tomorrow).

Most of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society combined with his personal experiences as native Peruvian. Vargas Llosa contributed to the creation of La Nueva Novela (The New Novel) in Latin America along other notable Latin American writers of the time such as Mario Benedetti, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Miguel Angel Asturias and João Guimarães Rosa.

Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career, and has gradually moved from the political left towards the right. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 as the center-right Frente Democrático (FREDEMO) coalition candidate, advocating neoliberal reforms. Subsequently, he has supported conservative-moderate candidates.

Early life and family
Mario Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family of Spanish descent on March 28, 1936, in the Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta, but his parents separated a few months before his birth. There is much speculation about the reasons for his parents' separation; proposals include the social inferiority of Ernesto Vargas to the Llosa family, and the mistreatment and oppression of Dora Llosa by Ernesto. A few months after Mario's birth, Ernesto revealed he was having an affair with a German woman; consequently, Mario has two younger half-brothers: Enrique and Ernesto Vargas.

Vargas Llosa lived with his maternal family in Arequipa until a year after his parents' divorce, when his maternal grandfather was named honorary consul for Peru in Bolivia. With his mother and her family, Vargas Llosa then moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he spent his childhood. His maternal family, the Llosas, were sustained by his grandfather, who also managed a cotton farm. While growing up in Cochabamba, his mother and her family told him that his father had died, rather than explaining that his parents had separated. During the government of Peruvian President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, Vargas Llosa's maternal grandfather obtained an important political post in the Peruvian coastal city of Piura, which prompted him and his mother to return to Peru near his grandfather, where Vargas Llosa studied at the Colegio Salesiano. In 1946, at the age of ten, he moved to Lima and met his father for the first time. His parents reestablished their relationship and lived in Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb, during his teenage years. While in Lima he studied at the Colegio La Salle. When Vargas Llosa was 14, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima where he gained inspiration for writing his first novel, The Time of the Hero.

A year before his graduation, Vargas Llosa was already working as an amateur journalist for local newspapers. He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper, La Industria, and where the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, La huida del inca, took place.

In 1953, during the government of Manuel A. Odría, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima's National University of San Marcos to study law and literature. He married Julia Urquidi, his uncle's sister-in-law, in 1955 at the age of 19; he was 13 years younger than she. Vargas Llosa began his literary career in 1957 with the publication of his first short stories, Los jefes and El abuelo. He graduated from the National University of San Marcos in 1958, and in the same year he received a scholarship to study at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. In 1960, after his scholarship in Madrid had expired, Vargas Llosa moved to France under the impression that he would receive a scholarship to study there; however, after he arrived in Paris he learned that he would not be receiving any scholarship. Despite Mario and Julia's poor economic status, the couple decided to remain in Paris where he was able to begin writing prolifically. Their marriage lasted only a few more years, ending in divorce in 1964. A year later, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children: Álvaro Vargas Llosa, a writer and editor; Gonzalo, a businessman; and Morgana, a photographer.

Writing career
Vargas Llosa's international career began in 1963 with La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs), which gained wide public attention and immediate success. This work won the Spanish Premio de la Critica and was published in English in 1966 as The Time of the Hero. He followed La ciudad y los perros with La casa verde (The Green House) in 1965. His third novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, was published in 1969, when he was only 33.

In 1971, Vargas Llosa published García Márquez: historia de un deicidio, as his doctoral thesis for the University of London, which was later published as a book. This limited edition of 20,000 quickly sold out. Despite great public demand (and at least one pirated edition), Vargas Llosa refused to allow its republication for many years. The study was eventually included in a 2006 volume of his collected works, which has not been translated into English.

Although Vargas Llosa wrote this book-length study about his onetime friend, Nobel prize-winning Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez, they have not spoken to each other in more than 30 years. In 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face in Mexico City at the Palacio de Bellas Artes ending the friendship. Francisco Igartua, Vargas Llosa’s friend and journalist, witnessed the event. In his book, Huellas de un Destierro, Igartua states that after Vargas Llosa knocked Garcia Marquez out, leaving him on the floor, the writer said: “That’s for what you did to Patricia in Barcelona.” Neither writer has publicly stated the underlying reasons for the misunderstanding. A photo of García Márquez's black eye was published in 2007, reigniting public interest in the feud. Despite the decades of silence, Vargas Llosa recently agreed to allow part of his book to be used as the introduction to a new edition of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America.

Vargas Llosa has also written book-length studies of the 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert and of Valencian writer Joanot Martorell. In A Writer's Reality (1991), he discussed his own novels.

His fourth novel, La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), published in 1981, affirmed Vargas Llosa's radical change towards themes like messianism and the irrational behaviour of humans. It would be almost 20 years before he wrote another novel; La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat) was published in 2000 (published in English in 2001). According to literary critic Raymond Williams, it is Vargas Llosa's most complete, most ambitious, and longest novel since La guerra del fin del mundo.

Later life and political involvement
Like many Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. He studied Marxism in depth as a university student and was later seduced into Communist ideals after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Gradually, Vargas Llosa realized that Cuban socialism was incompatible with what he considered to be general liberties and freedoms. The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred when Fidel Castro imprisoned the poet Herberto Padilla. Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote a letter to Fidel Castro protesting against the Cuban political system and the imprisonment of the artist. Vargas Llosa has identified himself with right-wing political ideologies ever since. Since he detached himself from communist ideals, he has opposed both left- and right-wing authoritarian regimes.

During the 1980s, Vargas Llosa became increasingly politically active in his native country, and became known for his staunch neoliberal views. In 1987, he helped form and soon became a leader of the Movimiento Libertad. The following year his party entered a coalition with the parties of Peru's two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaunde Terry (of the Popular Action party) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (of the Partido Popular Cristiano), to form the tripartite center-right coalition known as Frente Democrático (FREDEMO). He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the FREDEMO coalition. He proposed a drastic austerity program that frightened most of the country's poor. This program emphasized the need for privatization, a market economy, free trade, and most importantly, the dissemination of private property. During the campaign, his opponents read racy passages from his novels over the radio in an apparent attempt to shock voters. Although he won the first round with 34% of the vote, Vargas Llosa was defeated by a then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori, in the subsequent run-off. Vargas Llosa included an account of his run for the presidency in a memoir, published in an English-language translation (by Helen Lane) as A Fish in the Water. Since his defeat, Vargas Llosa has focused mainly on his writing, with the occasional political involvement.

After his electoral defeat he left Peru. He has mainly lived in London ever since, but spends roughly three months of the year in his native Peru. Vargas Llosa also acquired Spanish citizenship in 1993; he frequently visits Spain for various conferences and vacations there often. In 1994 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy). He has also been involved in the country's political arena. In February 2008 he stopped supporting the Partido Popular in favor of the recently created Union, Progress and Democracy, claiming that certain conservative views held by the former party are at odds with his liberal beliefs. His political ideologies appear in the book Política razonable, written with Fernando Savater, Rosa Díez, Álvaro Pombo, Albert Boadella and Carlos Martínez Gorriarán.

Vargas Llosa has taught at the Queen Mary College and King's College of the University of London, the Pullman campus of Washington State University, the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Georgetown University, and The City University of New York.

Style
Vargas Llosa's style revolves around the roles of both a creative novelist and a historian/propagandist. Unlike the previous notion of realistic discourse in Latin American and Spanish novels, Mario Vargas Llosa promotes the creation of a new vision of reality bounded by a non-fictional background by introducing La Nueva Novela along with other Latin American writers. This particular style encompasses historical material as well as Vargas Llosa's personal experiences. The illustration and interrelation of cultural, socio-economic, and political aspects of Peruvian and Latin American society appear throughout the writer's novels. The introduction of a mythical world in La Nueva Novela caught the attention of literary critics. Vargas Llosa depicts such mythical world in the novel The Green House.

The writer's novels cover many literary genres, including comedy (Pantaleón y las visitadoras), crime fiction (¿Quien mató a Palomino Molero?), the historical novel (La guerra del fin del mundo), the political thriller (La fiesta del chivo), and erotic literature (Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto). His writing style often includes intricate changes in time and narrator, similar to the style of American novelist William Faulkner, whom Vargas Llosa acknowledges as an extremely important literary influence.

The works of Mario Vargas Llosa's are viwed as both modernist and postmodernist novels. His early works, such as La casa verde and Conversación en la catedral seem to be of a modernist vein; however, his later texts, including Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La tía Julia y el escribidor, Historia de Mayta, and El hablador appear to follow a postmodernist mode of writing. Moreover, his earlier work seems to have a more serious, complex, and fragmented tone than his later novels, which are generally more farcical and simply written. Vargas Llosa has been commended for his ability to combine complex writing structures with simplistic themes.

Techniques of interlacing dialogues appear throughout most of Vargas Llosa's novels. By combining two conversations that occurred at different times, this technique creates the illusion of a flashback (shifting time). Moreover, the writer sometimes uses this technique as a means of shifting location by weaving together two conversations that are concurrent but happening in different places. The writer's novels also embody traditional themes that surround the conflictive nature of a novel's characters.

Many of his earlier novels were set in Peru, while in more recent work he has expanded to other regions of Latin America, such as Brazil and the Dominican Republic. One of his more recent novels, El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003), is set largely in France and Tahiti.

The Time of the Hero
The Time of the Hero's setting is a community of cadets in a Lima military school, and the plot is based on the author's own experiences at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy. The use of narrative time, aspects of the plot, and the main character's development are some of the literary elements influenced by Vargas Llosa's favourite William Faulkner novel, Light in August. The Time of the Hero also shows the impact of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre on Vargas Llosa; quotes from certain dialogues of Sartre's novels appear in the beginning of the book. This novel established what would become the main theme of Vargas Llosa's narratives: the individual's struggle for freedom within an oppressive reality. The book immediately impressed critics due to its vitality and adept usage of sophisticated literary technique. Nevertheless, the sharp criticism of Peruvian military establishment also led to a strong negative reception of the novel in Peru; several Peruvian generals attacked the novel by claiming it was the "work of a degenerate mind" and stating that Vargas Llosa was "paid by Ecuador" to undermine the prestige of the Peruvian Army.

The Green House
As in his previous novel, The Green House shows further influence of William Faulkner on the budding writer. Critic Raymond Williams describes this novel as "a denunciation of Peru's basic institutions", dealing with issues of abuse and exploitation. Some critics still consider this book to be Vargas Llosa's finest and most important achievement. In fact, Latin American literary critic, Gerald Martin suggests that La casa verde is "one of the greatest novels to have emerged from Latin America". The novel deals with a brothel called, "the Green House", and how its quasi-mythical presence affects the lives of the characters. The main plot follows Bonifacia, a girl who is about to receive the vows of the church, and the transformation that will lead her to become la Selvatica, the best-known prostitute of "the Green House". The novel immediately received an enthusiastic critical reception, confirming Vargas Llosa as an important voice of Latin American narrative. La casa verde went on to win the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967, contending with works by the veteran Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti and by Gabriel García Márquez. This novel alone accumulated enough awards to place the author among the leading figures of the Latin American boom at the time.

Conversation in the Cathedral
Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral) is considered among critics as the writer's most valuable narrative cycle and most overtly political narration. Published in two volumes, this novel was Vargas Llosa's first stated attempt at creating a "total novel"; in the writer's view, a total novel embodies the illustration of the different socio-economic levels in a society. The novel is a portrayal of Peru under the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría in the 1950s, and deals with the lives of characters from different social strata. The ambitious narrative is built around the stories of Santiago Zavala, the son of a minister, and Ambrosio, his chauffeur. A random meeting at a dog pound leads the pair to a riveting conversation at a nearby bar known as, "the Cathedral" (hence the title). During the encounter Zavala tries to find the truth about his father's role in the murder of a notorious Peruvian underworld figure, shedding light on the workings of a dictatorship along the way. Unfortunately for Zavala, his quest results in a dead end with no answers and no sign of a better future. The novel attacks the dictatorial government of Odría by showing how a dictatorship controls and destroys lives. The ongoing theme of hopelessness makes Conversación en la catedral Vargas Llosa's most bitter novel.

The War of the End of the World
The War of the End of the World is his first major work set outside Peru and is narrated on the basis of past events. Vargas Llosa claims this book to be his favorite and most difficult accomplishment. It fictionally recreates the War of Canudos, an incident in 19th-century Brazil in which an armed millenarian cult held off a siege by the national army for months. H owever, this novel is not based directly on the actual historical events; its main inspiration is the non-fiction account of those events published by Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha in 1902. As in Vargas Llosa's earlier work, this novel carries a sober and serious theme, with an overall dark tone. Vargas Llosa's bold exploration of humanity's propensity to idealize violence and his account of a man-made catastrophe brought on from the unexpected consequences of fanaticism earned this novel substantial recognition. In accordance to the ambition and accomplishment of the theme, critics have argued that this is one of Vargas Llosa's greatest literary pieces, in comparison to La casa verde. Even though the book has been acclaimed and recognized in Brazil, the book had an initial negative reception to the fact that a foreigner was writing about a Brazilian theme. The book was also criticized in the political aspect as revolutionary and anti-socialist.

The Feast of the Goat
The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000 (English translation in 2001), is based on the historical dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who governed the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Despite its lack of perfect historical accuracy, Vargas Llosa employs literary realism throughout the novel ; in fact, while describing La fiesta del chivo, he said, "I didn't invent anything that couldn't have happened ." The novel has three main strands: one concerns Urania Cabral, the daughter of a former political figure and Trujillo loyalist, who returns for the first time since leaving the Dominican Republic after Trujillo's assassination 30 years earlier; the second concentrates on the assassination itself, the conspirators who carry it out, and its consequences; the third and final strand deals with Trujillo himself in scenes from the end of his regime. The book quickly received positive reviews in Spain and Latin America and has had a significant impact on the Latin American world being regarded as one of Vargas Llosa's best pieces of work.

Other works
Following the monumental work Conversación en la Catedral, Vargas Llosa's literary career shifted away from political and societal themes. Williams describes this phase of works as "the discovery of humor". A humorous and shorter novel published in 1972, Pantaleón y las visitadoras (published later that year in English as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service), establishes vignettes of dialogues and documents about the Peruvian armed forces and a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas. These aspects of the plot are extremely similar to Vargas Llosa's earlier novel, La casa verde; in fact, Pantaleón y las visitadoras is basically a parody of both La casa verde itself and the literary approach that that novel represents. Vargas Llosa's motivation to write the novel came from actually witnessing prostitutes hired by the Peruvian Army and brought to serve soldiers in the jungle.

In 1977 Vargas Llosa published La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), based in part on his marriage to his first wife, Julia Urquidi, to whom he dedicated the novel. She later wrote a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say) in which she gave her own personal account of their relationship. She states that Vargas Llosa's account exaggerates many negative points in their courtship and marriage while minimizing her role of assisting his literary career. La tía Julia y el escribidor is considered one of the most striking examples of how the language and imagery of popular culture can be used in literature. The novel has been adapted into a Hollywood feature film, Tune in Tomorrow.

In 2006, Vargas Llosa's wrote Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl). This novel relates the decades-long obsession of its narrator, a Peruvian expatriate, with a woman with whom he first fell in love when both were teenagers.

Legacy
Mario Vargas Llosa is considered one of the major writers in Latin American literature, noted among other greats such as Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Among the previous and other writers of his generation, Vargas Llosa is an important contributor of La Nueva Novela (The New Novel) in Latin America. Indeed, for the literary critic Gerald Martin (writing in 1987), Vargas Llosa was "perhaps the most successful … [and] certainly the most controversial Latin American novelist of the past twenty-five years".

Most of Vargas Llosa's narratives have been translated into multiple languages, marking his international critical success. Vargas Llosa is also noted for his substantial career as a journalist, an accomplishment characteristic of few other Latin American writers. He is recognized among those who have most consciously promoted the embracing of both literature in general, and more specifically the novel itself, as avenues for meaningful commentary about life. During his prolific career, he has written more than a dozen novels and numerous other books and stories, and has been a voice for Latin American literature for decades. He has won numerous awards for his writing, from the 1959 Premio Leopoldo Alas and the 1962 Premio Biblioteca Breve to the 1993 Premio Planeta (for Lituma en los Andes) and the Jerusalem Prize in 1995. The most important distinction he has received is probably the 1994 Cervantes Prize, usually considered the most important award in Spanish-language literature.

A number of Vargas Llosa's works have been adapted to the screen, including The Time of the Hero and Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (both by the distinguished Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi) and The Feast of the Goat (by Vargas Llosa's own cousin, Luis Llosa). The Feast of the Goat has also been adapted as a theatrical play by Jorge Alí Triana, a Colombian playwright and director.

Fiction

 * 1959 – Los jefes (The Cubs and Other Stories, 1979)
 * 1963 – La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1966)
 * 1966 – La casa verde (The Green House, 1968)
 * 1969 – Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975)
 * 1973 – Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978)
 * 1977 – La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982)
 * 1981 – La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1984)
 * 1984 – Historia de Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1985)
 * 1986 – ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987)
 * 1987 – El hablador (The Storyteller, 1989)
 * 1988 – Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990)
 * 1993 – Lituma en los Andes (Death in the Andes, 1996)
 * 1997 – Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998)
 * 2000 – La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2002)
 * 2003 – El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003)
 * 2006 – Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl, 2007)

Drama

 * 1952 – La huida del inca
 * 1981 – La señorita de Tacna

Non-fiction

 * 1971 – García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (García Márquez: Story of a Deicide)
 * 1975 – La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y "Madame Bovary" (The Perpetual Orgy)
 * 1990 – La verdad de las mentiras: ensayos sobre la novela moderna (A Writer's Reality)
 * 1993 – El pez en el agua. Memorias (A Fish in the Water)
 * 1996 – La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo
 * 1997 – Cartas a un joven novelista (Letters to a Young Novelist)
 * 2001 – El lenguaje de la pasión (The Language of Passion)
 * 2004 – La tentación de lo imposible (The Temptation of the Impossible)
 * 2007 – El Pregón de Sevilla (as Introduction for LOS TOROS)

Vargas Llosa's essays and journalism have been collected as Contra viento y marea, issued in three volumes (1983, 1986, and 1990). A selection have been edited by John King and translated and published as Making Waves.