Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian author and Nobel literature laureate, dies at 89 – The Mercury News

Vargas Llosa began writing early, already 15 years old was a part -time crime reporter for the newspaper La Crónica. According to its official website, other works that had included review the names in the graveyard tombs in Peru, work as a teacher at the Berlitz school in Paris and briefly on the Spanish desktop in Agite France-Presse in Paris.

The continuous articles of publication in the press during most of his life, rather in a political opinion column twice in two months entitled “Touchstone” (touch stones) that was printed in several rookies.

Vargas Llosa became a fierce defender of personal and economic freedoms, gradually accumulating the adjustments and regularly attacked Latin American leftist leaders who saw as dictators.

Altheghe, one of the first defenders of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, then disappointed and denounced Cuba de Castro. By 1980, he said he no longer believed in socialism as a solution for developing nations.

In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa hit his Prize -winning partner of the Nobel Prize and former friend García Márquez, whom he later ridiculed as “courtesan of Castro.” It was never clear if the fight was about politics or a personal dispute, since Neith’s writer always wanted to discuss it publicly.

When a slowly turned his political career Townd Townd Free Market Conservatm, Vargas Llosa lost the support of many of his Latin American literary contemporaries and attracted many criticisms only of the fans of his work.

An early life with mimado and ‘hell’ in a military school

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936 in the southern city of Arequipa de Peru, at the top of the Andes at the foot of the Misti volcano.

His father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, left the family before he was born. To avoid the public scandal, his mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, tok his son to Bolivia, where his father was the Peruvian consul in Cocabamba.

Vargas Llosa said that his early life was “something traumatic”, spoiled by his mother and grandmother in a large house with servants, all his whims granted.

It wasn’t until he was 10 years old, after the family moved to the coastal city of Peru de Piura, who knew that his father was alive. His parents reconciled and the family moved to the capital of Peru, Lima.

Vargas Llosa described his father as a disciplinary that saw his son’s love for Jules Verne and writing poetry as safe routes for hunger, and feared for his “virility”, believing that “cleaning is always homosexual.”

After not being able to register the child in a naval academy because he was a minor, the father of Vargas Llosa sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, an experience that stayed with Vargas Slaba and led to “the time of the hero.” The book won the Spanish critics award.

The military academy “was like discovering hell,” said Vargas Llosa later.

He entered the University of San Marcos de Peru to study literature and law, “the first as a call and Lattter to please my family, which I believed, not without some cause, that writers usually starve to death.”

After obtaining his title of literature in 1958, hey, he did not bother to present his final law, Vargas Llosa won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in Madrid.

Vargas Llosa was inspired by much of his Peruvian homeland, but preferred to live abroad, residing for spells every year in Madrid, New York and Paris.

His first novels revealed a Peruvian world of military arrogance and brutity, or aristocratic decay, and stone agrazon Indians who simultaneously exist with the urban blight of the twentieth century.

“Peru is a kind of incurable disease and my relationship with it is intense, hard and full of passion violence,” Vargas Llosa wrote in 1983.

After 16 years in Europe, he returned in 1974 to Peru and then ruled for a military dictatorship of the left. “I realized that I was losing contact with the reality of my country and, above all, their language, which for a writer can be deadly,” he said.

In 1990, he presented himself to the Presidency of Peru, a reluctant candidate in a nation destroyed by an insurgency of Mesianic Maoist guerrillas and a basket case, a hyperinflation economy.

But he was defeated by an unknown university rector, Alberto Fujimori, who resolved much of the political and economic chaos, but became a corrupt and authoritarian leader in the process.

Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, friend of Vargas Llosa, then confessed that the writer’s candidacy had rooted, observing: “Peru’s uncertain gain would be the loss of literature. Literature is eternity, mere politics.”

Vargas Llosa also used his literary dream of Celt “in 2010. His latest published novel was” Harsh Times “in 2019 on a coup d’etat backed by the United States in Guatemala in 1954.

He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and hero visiting the teacher and publications of resident writers in more than in boxes and universities around the world.

In his adolescence, Vargas Llosa joined a communist cell and escaped and then married a 33-year-old Bolivian, Julia Urquidi-the sister-in-law of her uncle. Later he was inspired by his nine -year marriage to write the successful comic novel “Aunt Julia and the screenwriter” (Aunt Julia and the writing).

In 1965, he married his premium cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years younger, and together they had three children. They divorced 50 years later, and began a relationship with the figure of Spanish society Isabel Preysler, ex -wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022.

Vargas Llosa survives his children.

His letter announcing his death said that his remains will be cremated and that there will be no public ceremony.

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Giles reported from Madrid.

Originally published: April 14, 2025 at 10:21 am pdt