April 14
What best distinguished Mario Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima on April 13, 2025, was the voraciousness of his intellect and the elasticity of his literary talent. He was an advocate for the free-flow of ideas and a meticulous portraitist of what makes Latin America a fascinatingly complex landscape.
I admired Vargas Llosa’s stamina, his unpredictability, his perseverance. Suspicious of ideological orthodoxies, he ran for president of Peru in 1990—and lost soundly. Twenty years later, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The legacy he leaves behind is monumental: literature, he believed, must be far more than entertainment: it is sheer inquiry. As such, it must be defined by skepticism, by refusing to take anything for granted.
His novels, from Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) to The Feast of the Goat (2000), offer a nuanced portrait of just about every layer of society. Imbued by the influence of Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo, they are written with a nineteenth-century flair for realism and a hope for totality, juxtaposing a multiplicity of voices in an effort to see truth in the sum of its parts.
The last surviving member of the generation known as the Latin American Boom that included Julio Cortázar from Argentina, Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, Carlos Fuentes from Mexico, José Donoso from Chile, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante from Cuba, Vargas Llosa was also a superb essayist. His fortnightly opinion column “Touchstone” (“Piedra de Toque”) for the Madrid-based newspaper El País was a lucid example of rigor and daring. Its style was as hypnotizing as it was thought-provoking.
As Vargas Llosa’s career developed, so did his politics. He began as a fervent leftist and evolved into a supporter of neoliberal ideals. That odyssey maps the syncopated sides in the Spanish-speaking world. The swing of the pendulum is the true engine for progress.
—Ilan Stavans