A major writer of the Latin American “boom”, Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima at the age of 89, leaving behind a vast work, translated worldwide, and an intimate relationship with France, his real literary cradle.
Born in 1936 in Arequipa, he left Peru for Europe in the 1950s, led by a silent ambition: to become a writer in a country of letters. In Paris, where he settled in 1959, he found a world in effervescence, animated by Sartre, Camus and the new novel, and a capital which already reads the voices of Latin America, like Octavio Paz or Juan Rulfo. At 23, he settled there with Julia Urquidi, his first wife, who will become the heroine of Aunt Julia and the scribbling.
A Peruvian writer shaped by Paris
Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima, in his native country, but his heart also beaten for France, where he declared that he had “become a writer”. This sentence, pronounced in February 2023 during his speech to the French Academy, summed up an exceptional trajectory: that of a Hispano-Peruvian author who, without ever writing directly in French, found in France the intellectual and literary scene where to hatch his talent.
Flaubert’s influence and the discovery of the Pleiade
Upon his arrival in Paris, Vargas Llosa buys a copy of Madame Bovarythe founding novel of his admiration for Gustave Flaubert. This book will become his bedside companion, and the matrix of his essay Perpetual orgyessential reflection on the profession of writer.
Flaubert, but also Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Sartre or Camus, feed his romantic imagination. He inherits the stylistic rigor, narrative breath and obsession with form. In 2004, he paid tribute to Hugo with The temptation of the impossiblea brilliant study on The miserablewhere he explores the tension between fiction and politics.
His attachment to French literature will be crowned in 2016, when he became the first foreign writer to be published during his lifetime in the prestigious collection of the Pléiade, at Gallimard. This rare recognition testifies to the place it occupies in the literary heart of France.
From “challenge” to great novels
Long before being recognized worldwide, Vargas Llosa had already established deep ties with French culture. In 1957, still a student, he won his first literary prize for The challenge (“The challenge”), attributed by La Revue française. At that time, he was convinced that Peru, country without publishing houses and with few bookstores, does not allow a writer to hatch. He wants to become, he said, “French writer”.
In Paris, he works as a Spanish teacher, translator, AFP journalist, and begins to write The city and the dogs. Published in 1962, this hard and committed novel on brutality in a military school in Peru, receives the Biblioteca Breve Prize. He opens the way to a dense work, marked by social lucidity and narrative virtuosity.
Figure of the “boom” and voice of Latin America
With Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa embodies the golden generation of Latin American literature. Together, they impose on the world a literary continent in full effervescence, where magical realism, social criticism and romantic ambition intertwine.
But unlike his colleagues, Vargas Llosa remains faithful to a classic romantic structure, preferring to tell stories with clarity rather than experimenting to the extreme, as the new novel advocated. He explores political tensions, social injustices, drifts of power – themes found in Conversation in the cathedral, War of the end of the worldor The Celtic dream.
An assumed ideological turn
In the early 1970s, Mario Vargas Llosa operated a major political turning point: he turned away from Castro communism to get closer to liberal ideas, influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville. This ideological evolution earned him the hostility of South American intellectuals, but reinforces his links with French Liberal intellectual circles, in particular with the academician Jean-François Revel, notorious anti-communist.
This positioning in no way ends the recognition he enjoys in Europe, especially in France, where he pursues his publications and his intellectual interventions.
A work always alive
The influence of Vargas Llosa continues today. Some of his works are experiencing new youth thanks to streaming platforms. Tours and detours of the nasty girl should soon be adapted, just like One hundred years of loneliness by Garcia Márquez or House with spirits Isabel Allende. For Francisco Ramos, responsible for Latin America content at Netflix, which unites them is above all their narrative power and their ability to tell the cultures of their countries of origin.
These projects, carried out by massive investments and growing demand in Latin America, participate in registering these classics in a global visual memory.
A last return to Lima
Since 2024, Vargas Llosa had withdrawn from public life, returned to live in Lima. As he approaches his 89th birthday, at the end of March, some photos of him published by his son Alvaro on social networks showed him walking in the Peruvian capital, where he had written his last two novels: Five corners (2016) et I dedicate my silence (2023).
In one of these images, he appears on the arm of his grandson Leandro, smiling, simply dressed. A way of ending a course started in the solitude of writing and ended in family tenderness.
A Nobel anchored between two continents
In 2010, the Swedish Academy Crown Mario Vargas Llosa of the Nobel Prize in Literature, welcoming an author “describing the structure of power and its resistance, its revolts, its defeats”. He himself declared during the award ceremony: “I have never felt foreign in Europe, nor nowhere else”.
From Paris to Lima, from political fiction to romantic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa has drawn a cartography of the mind, between commitment, formal requirement and narrative passion. And it is undoubtedly in France, a homeland of adoption, that his dream of a writer was fulfilled in all his fullness.
