The Door That Closes with the Passing of Mario Vargas Llosa
With his death, Mario Vargas Llosa has closed the door on the most splendid era of our literature. The light, however, will remain on.
By Sergio Ramirez Mercado (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – In a lecture some years ago at Casa de América in Madrid, while Mario Vargas Llosa was weaving together his memories of the boom era and recalling the writers who were part of it with him, he paused in silent reflection and added: “It seems it will fall to me to turn off the light and close the door.”
He was the youngest of that generation that shaped—and transformed—twentieth-century Latin American literature. If we are even to call it a generation. One of its first peculiarities was that its members were not necessarily contemporaries: there was more than a twenty-year age gap between Julio Cortázar, the eldest, and Vargas Llosa, the youngest. Nor did they ever sign any aesthetic manifesto, and their political differences became substantial, especially regarding the era’s great dividing line—the Cuban Revolution.
What truly united them was the explosive charge they set at the foundations of Latin American fiction in a single decade—the 1960s—when Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz appeared in 1962; Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero in 1963; and Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967.
These four novels wielded formidable transformative power. Each in its own way broke traditional molds and gave Latin American literature, for the first time, a universal scope. They told the saga of the region’s history far from the vernacular language of the early twentieth century—a break already initiated by Juan Rulfo with the publication of Pedro Páramo in 1955. And also for the first time, this literature reached a broad readership beyond the Spanish-speaking world, and its novelists were no longer confined by the borders of their own countries.
Vargas Llosa was 26 when he won the Seix Barral’s Biblioteca Breve prize in 1962 with The Time of the Hero, a testament to literary precocity. He turned his adolescent experience as a cadet at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima into an innovative literary adventure in both structure and language. Already then, he was experimenting with that virtuosity he would carry throughout his work—fusing time and space, disjointing narrative events across paragraphs, assembling a puzzle that maintained tension and suspense like a thriller.
Among its many virtues, and just as Hopscotch did in its own way, The Time of the Hero introduced a new participatory way of reading, turning the reader into an accomplice of the literary act, however complex it seemed. But for those of us who were just beginning our literary journey, it taught us much more.
I was twenty when I first held The Time of the Hero in my hands. From the moment I read it, I wanted to take it apart to discover how it was built—just as an aspiring writer learns and absorbs innovations. From then on, I realized that Vargas Llosa taught method at every step, and one could learn from him with less risk of ending up imitating him, which inevitably happened with One Hundred Years of Solitude, whose verbal torrent swept the apprentice away in a flood of overflowing imagery and magical exaggeration. Furthermore, reading Vargas Llosa was like attending a masterclass in writing dialogue. Instead of dismissing spoken language, he turned it into the main tool of narration.
Perhaps one of the keys that prove a writer’s lasting place in the soul of the reader is that nostalgic feeling evoked by remembering the stories in their books—and how that feeling returns intact when revisiting those pages. That recurring wish that the book never ended, that it went on indefinitely. And the certainty that, in returning to it, we’ll discover something new, because it always has something more to teach or reveal.
That’s what happened to me when I opened the pages of The Green House, published in 1996, for which Vargas Llosa won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Venezuela. It was a novel that expanded the perspective of a geographical universe that was also a narrative universe: from the sandy deserts of Piura in Peru’s Pacific northwest—where a stranger builds what becomes the Green House brothel—to the intricate Amazon jungle: Iquitos, Santa María de Nieva, and their mighty rivers.
In Latin American literature, geography has always been a character in its own right. Vargas Llosa proves this again and again in many of his novels—a geography of vastness: highlands, mountains, jungles, populated by conscript soldiers, pimps, adventurers, missionaries, rubber tappers, prostitutes, smugglers, conmen, and exploiters. These characters recur in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973), The Storyteller (1987), Death in the Andes (1993), and The Dream of the Celt (2010).
It’s a world that never ceases to be picaresque. His characters often come from the popular classes, but this geography goes beyond mere scenery—it shelters the darkness of the most perverse exploitation, like that carried out by the Arana Company in Amazonian rubber camps against Indigenous tribes. A patent genocide seen through the eyes of Roger Casement, the idealist protagonist of The Dream of the Celt, and already present in Jose Eustasio Rivera’s 1924 novel The Vortex.
Nostalgia for The Green House, and double nostalgia for Conversation in the Cathedral, his 1969 novel of tabloid journalists, secret police, cabaret dancers, rebellious students, cantinas, brothels, and the gray dictatorship of General Odria. Ugly Lima. His most ambitious novel, and one I would call his masterpiece—if it weren’t in tight competition with others like The War of the End of the World (1981) or The Feast of the Goat (2000). Or better yet, we could say that Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece is composed of all his novels and stories written over six decades, from The Cubs (1959) to I Give You My Silence (2023). A total and totalizing body of work.
Another dimension that ensures the transcendence of this work is how Vargas Llosa becomes a chronicler of all Latin America, beyond the national borders of Peru, as proven in The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, and Harsh Times (2019).
He sought stories that could illuminate our shared, terrible fate, a legacy since independence of endless wars and military dictatorships, fanatical messiahs and feather-hatted tyrants, corruption and abuse of power as borderless plagues. From the Brazilian backlands of Antonio Conselheiro and his jagunços, to the sinister reign of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, to the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala by the United Fruit Company and the Dulles brothers, to install a mediocre puppet dictator, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas.
With his death, Mario Vargas Llosa has closed the door on the most splendid era of our literature. The light, however, will remain on.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.