The Burden of Vargas Llosa

Relax, this isn't an homage and I hated his politics too

Apr 24, 2025

Up until the atrocious events of last year, I was probably the most embarrassing thing to come out of Columbia University—for sure the most embarrassing to come out of their storied Casa Hispánica. Not only did I study with people determined and impressive enough to eventually get tenure-track positions in the death spiral known as the academic job market, but I also studied with cool nerds who became novelists, award-winning translators, and even MacArthur Fellows. An actual genius! I already knew I was kind of joke when I sat in my first seminar and realized I had no idea I was supposed to a) hate Cortazar (I still love him, I dunno what to say), b) think “Y tu mamá también” was boring (I like trips and mess, I dunno what to say), and c) approach César Aira as some sort of gift to letras hispanas (after one or two books, I was desperately seeking plot instead of delirium; I actually do know what to say about this but I’ll leave it at that).

My one saving grace was dropping out with a No Regrets/Never Look Back ethos that even the stodgiest of academics will recognize as game, and I am about to lose that small modicum of respect. Because I am going to write about Mario Vargas Llosa.

In Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa’s death could only be overshadowed by that of the Pope’s, so this is coming a little too late, as is my habit. But for several weeks, news of his passing dominated the cultural news cycle. We don’t have much when it comes to global recognition—Machu Picchu, ceviche (fuck ceviche), and guinea pig being the standard trinity—but Vargas Llosa was in the small pantheon of Peruvians Foreigners Knew About. Even now, I don’t know how far-reaching that was outside of the white-collared, literary, somewhat bougie, cultural industry circles I tend to circulate in. Like, I’m compelled to ask that you all read this glowing overview of his life’s work before we continue this convo because I’m not entirely sure many of you know who I’m going on about. And before we go any further, I should note that he did NOT write magical realism because way too many folks seem to think that is the one and only genre Latin American writers are capable of, especially if they are tied to the Boom Generation.

You’d think the man was an easy shoe-in for national hero but, alas, nothing in my country or from my country is ever that simple. Vargas Llosa is widely revered and also loathed in my nation, in no small part because he is a man that many view as having betrayed his youthful ideals. In the US this would be understood as the Hippie-Boomer-to-Neocon-Republican pipeline but that’s not a neat parallel because we are talking about Latin American politics here. So more like Militant-Romantic-Lefty-to-Facho-Derechista pipeline. It would be one thing if he muttered about this under his breath while continuing his incessant output, but the man was one to TALK. The last years of his life were defined by some of the most unforgivable shows of support to wretched figures like Bolsonaro and Kast. He even supported Keiko Fujimori’s presidential campaign, the scion of Alberto Fujimori—the very man he ran against for presidency, denounced during his dictatorship, and whose party he continued to criticize—when he succumbed to the paranoid-fueled idea that Pedro Castillo would turn Peru into Venezuela, that haunting tagline right-winged groups and socioeconomic elites throw at any presidential candidate they don’t like. Carolina A. Miranda’s obituary and this New Yorker article offer more details into his cringey-grandpa veer to the right.

When I heard news of his passing, I predicted most of my fellow Peruvians would react like this:

Government institutions, universities, cultural centers, publishing companies, bookstores, old guard writers, current writers attached to old guard writers, and anything having to do with the publishing and cultural industry: solemn and positive elegies with nary a controversial statement.
Super lefty anti-establishment writers and everyone I know who works in non-profits: Silence, or scathing but fair critiques, or some snarky comment to remind everyone they had a supernatural ability to understand the man was trash; yes starting with Los Cachorros, I don’t care if I was a pre-fetus then, I KNEW.
Normies: A version of “¡Gracias, maestro!” with some comment about how they read La ciudad y los perros and it was the only assigned book they liked.

This is what I posted on Instagram:

I thought twice about saying anything but, given that I had posted an RIP to Paquita la del Barrio a few months ago, I knew that if I stayed silent it was only because I wanted to look like a Cool Kid and that is very dumb at 42-years-old. “Rata de dos patas” is canon too but Conversación en La Catedral had a more profound impact on me than my aunt’s go-to-karaoke song.

This is the point in the essay where you might expect that I’ll go on some long diatribe about separating the art from the artist, or not separating the art from the artist, or what we do with art monsters, but psych! That debate has gone on in circles since Barthes picked up a pen and it bores me. By now you’ve made your decision on the matter. Plus, that’s not what I find interesting about Vargas Llosa’s death. What I find interesting is what it says about the current consumption of literature in Peru.

Since my first days in Morningside Heights up until this very second, I’ve felt like Peruvian literary consumption is defined by the image of “fisura” or fissure. On one side of this breakage, we have an audience that craves and gorges on Vargas Llosa and his ilk—all those Boom authors that reached global fame (García Márquez, Fuentes, etc. etc.), their lesser-known generational counterparts (think Alfredo Bryce Echenique), the journalist-author-media figure of the 80s and 90s (Alonso Cueto, Jaime Bayly), down to the perfectly-fine but overhyped post-Fujimori authors (Renato Cisneros, Santiago Rocangliolo). I say overhyped through no real fault of their own, but because the local media was so, so, so intent on finding the next Vargas Llosa that they laser focused on writers who quite literally looked like they could be him: mostly upper-middle class, Lima-centric (if we think of Lima as comprising only Barranco, Miraflores, San Isidro, Surco and La Molina) and, of course, male.

On the other side of this split were the authors the Hispanophone academia abroad, the more daring publishing houses and indie operations, my fellow artsy friends, and I were excited about. Which was not the Boom or the authors who wanted to desperately cling to a Boom vibe. These authors were—shocking!—more female (Gabriela Wiener), more mestizo (Marco Avilés), more Coneros (Teresa Orbegoso), with greater ties to the provinces, more marrón (Rocío Quillahuamán). Authors who had grown up in the diaspora (Daniel Alarcón) and who wanted to make their mark on an archive that had often ignored the stories of women (Claudia Sálazar Jiménez), racialized groups, and sexual/gender minorities.

And neither the twaine shall meet.

Kidding! But barely.

For a good ten or fifteen years, I couldn’t really have a conversation about Peruvian literature with the average person in my own country. To start, we are not a country of readers. The average Peruvian reads 1.9 books a year, which is one of the worst rates in Latin America. But even among the people I knew who read, it was like pulling teeth. Because they wanted to talk about Vargas Llosa and Fuentes and García Márquez, still, and they had no idea who any of the people I was studying were. They were mildly curious about the rise of Latin American women writers in translation, less curious about the number of US or Spanish-born diaspora writers, and had zero interest in reading any of the firsthand accounts of children whose parents had been in the Shining Path (José Carlos Agüero). I can’t blame them! They mostly took their cues from very institutional media conglomerates like El Comercio, who kept ignoring the rise of this more diverse crop of authors until those writers started winning international prizes. And then they had no choice but to cover them.

Of all the criticism Vargas Llosa received, the weakest one was that he couldn’t say shit about Peru because he went up and moved to Spain in the 90s and made his life there. Amigues, the bulk of writers you celebrate as having a more piercing, insightful and visceral discourse about Peru have mostly been educated abroad, anointed abroad, and continue to make a living abroad. I think distance can be a source of escapism. It can also be a source of clarity.

Since my return, I’ve tried to close the gaps in my understanding of Peruvian writers. After I withdrew from my PhD program, I kept paying less and less attention to Latin American literature, period. Peruvian literature has never had a great hold in the international market—Vargas Llosa was it, for a very long time—so any real update I got was during trips home. Today, it seems like your average reader is more willing to go beyond the Boom, though I can attest that self-help, business and romantasy are still the big moneymakers. I’m guessing young, artsy nerds are picking up their cues from BookTok and other influencers cause no one reads newspapers anymore either. The book club selections of the many indie bookstores near my house are solid literary fiction, though most opt for international titles instead of homegrown talent. That fissure is not as severe as it once was. I’m buoyed by the amount of literary activity that invites and includes a wide array of writers that don’t fit the “Vargas Llosa” profile. There is hope after all. But even yesterday, when I went to one of my favorite bookstores for World Book Day, the very helpful and enthusiastic bookseller pointed out all the Literary Men of Yore—Vargas Llosa, Ribeyro, Arguedas, Valdelomar, Mariátegui, etc.‚—before perking up when he saw my women-only selection. His impulse was less machismo and more capitalist. It was his first time meeting me and assumed I’d want lo de siempre.

Mario Vargas Llosa is not my favorite Peruvian writer of the 60s and 70s. That would be Alfredo Bryce Echenique, who is every bit as pituco, limeño, upper-middle class, white, and isolated from the rest of the country as Vargas Llosa. Even more so! But Bryce made a name for himself by skewering his snobbish bubble and staying in his lane. He never offered all-encompassing theories about Peru’s problems nor any solutions. For that and his impeccable humor, he is mostly beloved.

Still, Vargas Llosa did teach me about a certain type of Peru. Reading Conversación en La Catedral at 17 or 18 was a defining experience in my young literary mind, when my angst over my complicated relationship with my country was at its peak. When I woke up every day wondering en que momento se jodió el Perú. Here was a novel that took that concern seriously, that mapped out the worst abuses of a patriarchal, racist, postcolonial system that was taken as natural and necessary, instead of a moral aberration. It boggles my mind how someone who could write so cuttingly about power was incapable of seeing himself ensnared by the worst of it later in his life. Sometimes it takes one to know one. In any case, Conversación was only a tiny a glimpse of this complex web of fuckery that is Peruvian history, but an illuminating one.

By the time Vargas Llosa passed away, I hadn’t read his novels since 2010 and had stopped caring what he had to say about one issue or another. Part of it was because his political opinions had become deplorable, but part of it was less militant. I was just more interested in what other people had to say; I was more interested in what my generation had to say. I had already been raised and trained in a culture that had so deified the Boom writers, folks could not even conceive of any new developments or innovations in literary styling and intellectual inquiries after them. But the thing is that these authors, as groundbreaking as they were, were still just men, bound by their time, their biases, their own preferences, and their own limitations.

I can’t help but think that Latin American authors of today have a strong oedipal urge to kill their literary dads. Boom writers are usually the only ones foreigners wax poetic about and are often the only ones our own compatriotas will have read. I write little ditties about tormenting my brother-in-law on a cruise to Estonia and yet, at least once a year, someone will ask me if I write magical realism. I’m sure there are those who will say there is no trace of Vargas Llosa in their manuscripts, but there’s perhaps no greater way of recognizing someone’s influence than writing against their narrative or filling in the blanks of what he refused to witness or understand. I know there are reasons to mourn the loss of Great Movements and sweeping cultural phenomena, but I prefer small and heterogenous to one voice that overwhelms everyone else. So if nothing else, I hope that the space he leaves behind gives younger generations a chance to find a multitude of fathers and mothers, perhaps ones that are less fraught.

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