The Guardian About Mario Vargas Llosa

Alberto Manguel writes in ‘We waited greedily for his novels’: Mario Vargas Llosa, a revolutionary of Spanish-language fiction what may be enough to get you to read him.

Until then, the so-called “novel of protest” in the literatures of Latin America had Zola as its model. Under the large shadow of the author of La Terre and Germinal, writers such as Ciro Alegría and José María Arguedas had written about the lives of those whom our European culture had taught us to deny. Vargas Llosa didn’t follow Zola but rather chose Flaubert as his guide, writing a decade later a splendid essay, The Perpetual Orgy, in which he argued that Madame Bovary kickstarted the modern novel by establishing an “objective” narrator who, because they refused to preach, gave the illusion of telling a story that was true.

We waited with greedy expectation for Vargas Llosa’s next novels, The Green House (1966) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), and later Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and the erotically humorous Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), all the time trying to discover who this man was who, in public life, swayed his political alliances from left to right, all the time remaining committed, in his fiction, to basic precepts of human empathy. 

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