n the spring of 1991, the prestigious quarterly Urdu literary magazine Aaj devoted an entire issue to the selected writings of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. Its editor, Ajmal Kamal, justified the selection by arguing: “From history to colonisation and violence to political theatrics, the story of this Latin American country (Colombia) resembles that of any Third World country.” Kamal continued: “It’s a sad story of hopelessness. However, Latin American writers have challenged that despair with an unrelenting stream of literary brilliance.”

One of the luminous voices who helped shape the literary riches of Latin American literature alongside García Márquez was Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, who passed away on April 13 in Lima. Though there are few direct references to any specific country in our part of the Third World in the writings of either Márquez or Vargas Llosa, a cursory mention of the ‘fight between leapers and gravediggers’ stands as a rare exception in the latter’s work.

On his death at the age of 89, a fellow Peruvian writer described him as “the founder of the idea of being a universal Peruvian novelist.” Another remarked: “To describe Vargas is like describing a continent. His books offer a universal idea of Peruan-ness.”

Born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, into a middle-class family, Mario Vargas Llosa began writing at the age of five. The separation of his parents during his childhood gave him the emotional impetus to explore individual suffering in his work, a theme that ran throughout his six-decade literary career. His time at a military academy instilled in him the discipline and consistency to produce outstanding fiction with few interruptions.

“Literature is the transportation of reality,” he once said. “Reality is chaotic, it has no order, but when it turns into a novel, it does.”

A Fish in the Water, is his formal autobiography. Traces of his information about his childhood can also be found in his brilliant novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. He published his first novel, The Time of the Hero (City and the Dogs), at the age of 26. At 30, he followed with The Green House and, at 33, Conversation in the Cathedral.

Vargas Llosa was an essential part of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s, alongside Colombian García Márquez, Argentinian Julio Cortázar and Mexican Carlos Fuentes that reshaped Latin American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. That global explosion of writers freed Latin American novelists who had previously been confined by their national borders and vernacular traditions.

Besides producing fiction, the young Mario Vargas Llosa pursued a political path common to many Latin American writers of his generation. Outraged by their leaders’ demagogic tactics and the expropriation of American companies across the continent, many of these writers turned to Marxism as a popular means of protest. “It was very difficult for a young Latin American who faced social problems and racism in the ’50s not to see socialism or communism as the solution for a continent ravaged from end to end by dictatorships,” Vargas Llosa wrote in his autobiography, A Fish in the Water.

However, his alignment with the political Left was brief. Following five trips to Cuba, Vargas Llosa distanced himself from socialist ideas in 1971. The apparent turning point was Cuba’s support for the Soviet Union’s intervention in Prague in 1968. His disillusionment deepened and he later wrote of Castro’s regime: “A red totalitarianism is triumphing under the palm trees of lyrical illusion.”

For the rest of his life, Vargas Llosa was a staunch conservative and a bete noire for the Latin American Left. He supported right-wing leaders and military governments across the continent and remained a vocal critic of Leftist ideologies. “No country has advanced in the world thanks to the models set up by the Left,” he once declared. When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher left office after eleven years in power, Vargas Llosa sent her a bouquet of flowers, stating that he was “running short of words to describe what she has done for the cause of freedom.”

He maintained his conservative position until his final years. “I accept that I am a defender of liberalism if we define it as an attitude of tolerance for adverse ideas,” he once said. More recently, he coined the phrase “voting badly,“ under which he criticised political movements he viewed as threats to democracy, whether from the Peruvian left or figures like Donald Trump.

Politics and literature ran in parallel throughout his life. After an unsuccessful presidential bid in Peru in 1990, Vargas Llosa withdrew from active politics, relocated to Spain and continued to write novels and newspaper columns. In 2010, he received what his fellow Latin American writer Pablo Neruda once described as a “delayed spring” — a call from the Swedish Academy announcing that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what they called “his cartography of structures of power and his sharp images of resistance, rebellion and the defeat of the individual.”

From The Feast of the Goat, a novel about Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, to The Dream of the Celt, which explores the brutal treatment of indigenous people in the Congo by European companies, and The War of the End of the World, focused on 19th-Century Brazil — Vargas Llosa captured the suffering of individuals caught in the grip of history and violence.

For much of his life, he moved between Madrid, Paris, London and Barcelona, but Lima always remained with him. “For me, Peru is a kind of incurable disease,” he once said. After publishing his final novel, I Dedicate My Silence to You, in 2023, he bid farewell to fiction and returned to Lima. Before his peaceful death at the age of 89, he spent each Sunday revisiting his city’s familiar streets and reflecting on his early years. “My starting point is always a memory,” he said.

While García Márquez described the essence of Latin America’s solitude as the absence of any conventional means to make their lives appear believable, Mario Vargas Llosa, through his many novels, essays and newspaper columns, found his niche with remarkable clarity. In his writing, this towering figure of Latin American literature addressed Peru’s national, cultural and ethnic complexities while seeking a universal vision of the human condition. His works, without doubt, rendered death what he once called “a passing spectacle.”

The writer is a graduate of public policy from Monash University, Australia. He posts on X @gobindmeghwar