Mario Vargas Llosa
From Philosopedia
Vargas Llosa, Mario (28 March 1936– )
A Peruvian novelist and Anti-Marxist politician, Vargas Llosa in 1990 unsuccessfully ran for the presidency. His works emphasize the ugly and grotesque, and he delves into the minds of his characters, overcoming barriers of both time and space. His fiction paints a portrait of Peruvian society that is both severe and tender.
His novels include The Time of the Hero (1962; tr. 1966), The Green House (1966, tr. 1968), Conversation in the Cathedral (1969, tr. 1975), The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984, tr. 1986), and The War of the End of the World (1981, tr. 1982). Vargas Llosa also wrote The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (1975, tr. 1986), Writer’s Reality (tr. 1991), and Death in the Andes (1996). In 2007, a Spanish translation by John King was printed of The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables.
Although his doctoral dissertation had been about Gabriel García Márquez, he came to disagree with Garcia Márquez’s support of Fidel Castro, and the two one night got into an argument in a Mexico City theater. Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez, and the novelist returned the punch, writing later that it was “something that one hardly ever gets to do to the subject of one’s doctoral dissertation.”
In La Jornada, photographer Rodrigo Moya was asked about his having taken the photo of Garcia Marquez's black eye, and he wrote that at a movie theater packed with people attending the premiere of a film about the plane crash survivors in the Andes who turned to cannibalism, Vargas had rushed up to Garcia, who innocently tried to embrace him. Instead Vargas hit him, Garcia's blood gushing everywhere. Moya said the cause was not political but, rather, it was personal: Garcia had consoled Vargas's wife during a difficult period in the marriage.
Vargas Llosa is a non-theist who, in 1995, was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Humanist Academy.
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