The Bad Girl (2006)
I first discovered Mario Vargas Llosa in 2010 when he was mentioned in an article alongside Gabriel García Márquez. And with a title like The Bad Girl in his bibliography, I couldn’t resist reading this story of unrequited love and a lifelong of coincidences.
The narrator, Ricardo, first meets Lily in 1950s Lima. They are teenagers and music and dancing fill the streets of Miraflores and the banks of the Malecon. She says she is from Chile, but when an society aunt discerns the deception in her accent, she disappears. Ricardo soon discovers that she lied about everything. And she’ll reappear and disappear throughout his life.
Cliff views from the Malecon in Miraflores
In 1960s Paris, they meet again. He is working as a translator for UNESCO, and she is, well, a fighter in training under a communist leader. She is en route to Cuba, where Castro’s revolution has inspired fervor that reached countries as far as Asia and Africa. Paris itself was caught up in the excitement of those times and became a breeding ground for leftist parties building their own guerrilla armies. Young Peruvians who came of age in the most violent years under President Manuel Odría are hoping to turn their country into the second Socialist Republic of Latin America.
Fast forward to three years later, and she is suddenly the elegantly-clad wife of a French diplomat. They become illicit and frantic lovers until she disappears again, without a trace, and not without taking her husband’s life savings with her.
La Casa Courret, the oldest photography studio in Lima, was founded in 1865.
The next stop is 1970s London, which has replaced Paris as the center of culture. It was the birthplace of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, the miniskirt, open homosexuality, and widespread LSD and free love. So it should be no surprise that she would turn up here, this time as the wife of a horse breeder and trader who often took her on business trips abroad. When she is in London, they carry on another more passionate, secret affair. This lasted two years until one day, he shows up at their usual hotel but is greeted only with a note saying goodbye and that she’s off to Japan with her husband. And so he finds a way to follow her. In 1980s Tokyo, she becomes the lover-mule of a Japanese smuggler, and Ricardo is thrust into a sexually deviant underworld with scenes of disturbing carnality.
In the 1970s, trees had to be replanted all over Miraflores when 100-year-old roots began to crack the sidewalks.
Lily is inspired by Madame Bovary – Flaubert’s tragic heroine turned here into a femme fatale in a dangerous post-feminist world. And while the characters and their stories are richly imaginative, the tales intertwine with real history – the turbulent times in Peru under the Odría dictatorship, the Cuban Revolution that sowed the seeds of communist rebellions all over Latin America, the artist circles of Paris, the burgeoning counter-culture of 1970s London, and Vargas Llosa’s own experiences as a young and aspiring writer among other intellectuals, including Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Argentinian writer and academic Jorge Luis Borges, and Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier.
Buildings in Downtown Lima
The Time of the Hero (1963)
As I did with García Márquez’s books a decade before, I would read Vargas Llosa obsessively in the following years. His first novel, In The Time of the Hero, is set in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, a boarding school for high schoolers that Llosa attended from 1950 to 1951. Like many upper-class Peruvian families who sent their unruly sons there to learn discipline and structure, Llosa was sent by his father in hopes of curing him of his literary disposition. Instead, the academy fueled it. He wrote poetry and love letters for sale to his classmates. And those two years would provide him with the story for his book.
Llosa quickly discovered that the Leoncio Prado Military Academy is the perfect representation of Peruvian society. In addition to boys from the upper class, middle-class families sent their sons there primarily to train them to be officers and prepare them for a military career. And poor families from all over the country could also send their sons as grant recipients which the academy sponsored 100 of every year. It was Llosa’s first exposure to Peruvians from all walks of life, including those of indigenous backgrounds, mixed races, and immigrants. He also quickly learned of the unavoidable prejudices among them. Llosa knew immediately he would write a book about this experience.
Municipal Palace, Lima
As a military school, Leoncio Prado imposed a strict system dominated by physical force, fueling the boys’ violent tendencies. In The Time of the Hero, a group of cadets is caught up in a story of corruption, secrecy and machismo, and presents a hierarchy of a society where those at the top lay abuse on those below them. When a whistleblower is murdered, the academy covers up the crime, more concerned about its reputation than justice. Never shying away from controversial subjects, Llosa shines a light on the dehumanizing conditions of military institutions, especially one marred with so much corruption and despotism.
The book’s negative portrayal of the Peruvian military resulted in leaders and conservatives condemning it as pro-Ecuadorian propaganda, and they burned copies in the academy courtyard, which only made the book more popular. To this day, Vargas Llosa isn’t sure if people liked his book or only read it because of the controversy. But it did garner him one of Spain’s top literary prizes, and it’s seen as one of the precursors to the Latin American Boom that exploded in the following two decades.
Plaza de Armas, Lima
Conversations in The Cathedral (1969)
In the same way García Márquez taught me the long and difficult history of Colombia through his fiction, Vargas Llosa taught me about Peru’s. In Conversations in The Cathedral (named after a bar, not a church), Vargas Llosa gives a glimpse of 1940s and 50s Peru, when the Odría dictatorship extended its claws into every aspect of life, government and society. He was president of Peru from 1948 to 1956 – el ochenio as they call it – eight long years that coincided with Vargas Llosa’s coming of age.
Manuel Odría’s rise to power began after his military training in the U.S. He became a victorious general during Peru’s war against Ecuador and successfully led a military coup to overthrow the then-president José Bustamante. Bustamante had refused to ban the America Popular Revolutionary Alliance, an anti-imperialist and pro-communist political party. After Odría took over as president, he banned APRA, and with his anti-communist stance U.S. investments poured into the country, resulting in an economic boom. He adopted a populist approach modeled after Juan Perón’s of Argentina. He increased wages, expanded social security, developed low-income housing, and made improvements in public education. But his regime became increasingly violent and repressive, encroaching on people’s civil rights and stamping out all opposition parties. Public meetings of any kind were prohibited, and critics of the regimes were routinely tortured and murdered.
Archbishop’s Palace, Lima
The characters in Conversations in The Cathedral are a mix of the real and the fictional, each representing the varying sides of society in those times. Santiago, the black-sheep son of a famous politician, is a communist and a journalist, and the symbol of the young generation who feels disillusioned and powerless. His father, Don Fermin, is his connection to the rich and often corrupt who are amassing the country’s fortunes and turning the wheels of power. Ambrosio comes from Lima’s poor lower class. After serving as the henchman for the Odría regime, he becomes Don Fermin’s chauffeur and secretly exploited lover. Cayo Bermúdez, who helps the president rise to power and becomes his right-hand man, is responsible for the security of the regime and crushing all opposition. He is based on Esparza Zañartu, Odría’s real-life minister of internal affairs, who set up a network of informers in universities and unions and then used censorship, torture and deportation against those accused of opposing the regime. Vargas Llosa had met him once when he attempted to bring blankets to a group of communist students who were arrested during a meeting. In these characters, we see how the dictatorship managed to infiltrate every sphere of public and private life.
Written in episodic dialogues, Conversations in The Cathedral perfectly captures the turmoil of those years – the brutality and violence of the regime, the student protests, the disillusionment of an entire generation, and the Marxist-leftist groups that formed in opposition. During that time, Vargas Llosa, the young idealist, had become a Marxist himself, and the scenes of communist resistance were inspired by his own clandestine activities at the University of San Marcos. Here, again, he exposes the county’s rampant corruption, government censorship, and erosion of personal freedoms. The book, in essence, provides a wider panorama of a Latin America that has always been fraught with such tyranny.
Arequipa Library
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)
Blending autobiography and fiction, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter follows a writer’s young career as he falls in love with his much older and twice-divorce aunt. Based in part on Vargas Llosa’s first marriage to Julia Urquidi, a distant aunt recently divorced and visiting from Bolivia. They started their affair secretly. But as his family caught on, he decided to elope with her. He was nineteen, still a minor in Peru until the age of 21. With the help of his friends and cousin, they went from town to town, but since no one would marry them, Vargas Llosa changed the year on his birth certificate. Their family was infuriated with the nees, especially his patriarchal father, who threatened Urquidi with expulsion.
Urquidi left for Chile to stay with her parents while Vargas Llosa took on several jobs so that he could get an apartment and support them. One of his employers was Radio Panamericana. From here, his narrator in the book takes us on a comical and satirical semi-autobiographical story of a young writer searching for creative freedom and a fulfilling marriage. He only succeeds at one. The book ends with him leaving for Paris, single, to pursue his writing career. In real life, Vargas Llosa goes to Spain and France to study and write after his divorce.
183 Porta Street in Miraflores, where Vargas Llosa and Julia lived when they were first married
The War of the End of the World (1981)
Inspired by the true story of the Canudos War, The War of the End of the World is a sweeping historical novel set in the backlands of Bahia of Brazil from 1896 to 1897. Vargas Llosa had read Os Sertões, by Brazilian sociologist Euclides da Cunha. It documented the true story of the war and the military expeditions led by the Republican government against the sertanejos, or inhabitants of the backlands. The story begins with the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the fall of the monarchy in 1889. The newly-formed Republic of Brazil was then headed by powerful landowners, most of whom wanted to reestablish slavery. Democracy was actually nominal, and voters in rural areas were forced to cast votes for candidates chosen by their bosses. Other times, election results were changed altogether to keep oligarchs in power.
Back then, Canudos was a wholly isolated state in the northeast. Led by an enigmatic figure, Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, whose followers called “The Counselor,” the poor and newly freed slaves began to form form an autonomous society. They abolished alcohol and prostitution, and made religion mandatory, with rigid punishments for crimes. Even though it was peaceful, aristocrats and landowners saw them as a threat and sent the military to dismantle their settlement. Soldiers slaughtered over 25,000 inhabitants.
At 3,810 meters, Lake Titicaca is the world’s highest lake.
Vargas Llosa’s fictional account tells the story of The Counselor and his rise to prophetic powers as he travels through the small farming communities, building churches, dams and other much-needed infrastructure. Several thousand followers join him. Because Canudos was difficult to reach, they are able to build a prospering community until trade with nearby towns spur conflicts with other leaders. Clashes became increasingly violent and the sertanejos are painted as British-backed separatists who want to bring back the monarchy. Four military campaigns and thousands of soldiers are sent. They starve the settlement into submission and then burn whatever is left to the ground. Because most of The Counselor’s followers were poor and illiterate, first-hand accounts do not exist. This story is the result of years of meticulous research, beginning with da Cunha’s book. Vargas Llosa also visited the 25 villages in Canudos where The Counselor had once preached. He met many descendants of the war and discovered that, to this day, The Counselor is revered by the townspeople.
The Uros people of Lake Titicaca speak the ancient language of Aymara.
“What had happened in Canudos is something I immediately discovered had been happening all over Latin America – in Mexico, in Central America, in Peru, in different countries of South America. The extraordinary misunderstanding between the modern part of the country and the poor peasants of the country, this kind of total, reciprocal blindness, this incapacity to understand what the other was thinking and believing had produced massacres all over Latin America.”
The Inca Rail from Cusco to Machu Picchu
Death in the Andes (1993)
Set in the Peruvian interior – in the Apurímac valley where the Incas built their famed citadel – Death in the Andes follows Corporal Lituma, whom we first meet in Piura in Who Killed Palomino Molero. He is now assigned to the remote town of Noccos to protect workers and merchants building a new road. When three men disappear, his investigation takes him into the deep, dark history of this desolate region.
In the 1980s, the Shining Path came into power in Peru, hoping to incite a cultural revolution and turn Peru into a communist state. Deep in the Andes, they formed an army and terrorized villages, driven by a distorted ideology. They killed indiscriminately – everyone from peasants and civilians to foreigners and government officials they deemed as capitalists who needed to be punished.
Horseback ride through local Andean communities
The Sanderistas, as they are referred to in the book, are among the suspects. So are the husband and wife cantineros, or bar keeps, who are known to practice witchcraft. There are numerous scenes of the Sanderistas terrorizing the surrounding towns, interrogating locals, persecuting volunteers and stoning foreigners to death. But the cantinero, aptly named Dionisio, is known to once be a leader of a cult, and there are stories of dark magic and human sacrifice (a practice that dates back to pre-Incan settlements). The three men may have been offered up to the gods so that the new roads could be built safely.
Vividly told, Vargas Llosa weaves an intricate tale of politics, history and folklore. The same sacred ground that once offered the Incas refuge has now become a hostile battleground of ideologies as the Shining Path forge their army. And the clash of cultures between the deeply-rooted traditions of indigenous people and modern beliefs that have plagued the third world since colonization is present still.
Arequipa airport with the Andes mountains in the background
The Feast of the Goat (2001)
Another sweeping historical saga, The Feast of the Goat, tells of Rafael Trujillo’s 30-year rule over the Dominican Republic. Merciless and brutally tyrannical, he built a secret police who imprisoned and killed those who opposed him. He ordered the massacre of Haitian immigrants. Some 50,000 people were killed under his command. He demanded the loyalty of his ministers by sleeping with their wives and the devotion of citizens by having families gift him their daughters. Peasants especially gave up their daughters to be married off to Trujillio’s soldiers.
The Cristo Blanco was a gift from the Palestinian community of Cusco and symbolizes protection over the city.
Vargas Llosa’s denounced character, Agustín Cabral, is based on Anselmo Paulino, Trujillo’s second-in-command. One of many in his inner circle who are portrayed as followers driven by a mix of fear and ambition. They carry out horrifying acts of torture, including mutilations, electrocutions and beatings.
Cabral is sent to prison and after three years, to exile, in fears that he might take over the presidency one day. His daughter, Urania, is sexually assaulted by the dictator. As the book’s narrator, she delves into the permanent damage the regime left behind in the lives of so many women.
The Amura people in Cusco
“I have been following so many cases of dictatorships in Latin America. But in the 31 years of Trujillo, women suffered especially. And it was a case of total control of the life and mind of the whole society, of 3 million Dominicans.”
With years of research, visits to the Dominican Republic, and interviews with witnesses, Vargas Llosa crafts a harrowing story so symbolic of 20th-century Latin America, trapped in the throngs of so many dictators – Papa Doc of Haiti, the Samoza family of Nicaragua, and Augusto Pinochet of Chile, to name a few.
Llamas in Machu Picchu
Nobel Lecture (2010)
In his Nobel Lecture, In Praise of Reading and Fiction, Vargas Llosa remembers a childhood where books were his sanctuary. He often memorized poems with his grandfather, and his mother was always moved by those of Pablo Neruda. He credits writers as historians, believing history and literature are inseparable. He has claimed that William Faulkner is perhaps the greatest historian of the Deep South and credited Tolstoy’s War and Peace as the single most affecting account of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia. And books as engines of progress – “What we call civilization is a process that started with this dissatisfaction with the world as it is.”
Arequipa was the colonial-era capital of Peru and Vargas Llosa’s birthplace.
