The Candidate as Writer

For the last 20 years, Mario Vargas Llosa has lived in Paris, Barcelona and London. In 1976, when he was elected president of PEN International, he became, so to speak, a card-carrying member of the international literary elite, a membership that was confirmed in 1985 when he won the prestigious Ritz-Paris Hemingway Prize (1985).

His first novel, “The City and the Dogs” (1963), placed the young writer into the ranks of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Carlos Fuentes, leaders of the so-called Latin American literary boom. The story portrays the brutal life at a Lima military academy where Vargas Llosa studied as a youth. It explores a system that promotes false loyalties, blind obedience and cruelty.

The novel shows “an uncanny ability to describe the urban scene, masterful use of characterization and plot line and solid literary quality,” according to Washington Delgado, a Peruvian book critic.

Literary critics consider “The City and the Dogs” and “Conversations in the Cathedral” (1969) as among Vargas Llosa’s best novels. The works are loosely autobiographical and deal with the young writer’s familiarity with upper-class Lima society, raising questions of ethical choice and the abuse of authority.

“Conversations in the Cathedral” takes place during the dictatorship of Gen. Manuel Odria in the 1950s and shows painstaking historical research as well as stylistic innovations characteristic of European and American writers.

“I think the underlying theme of those books is power,” the novelist said in an interview with The Times, “political, economic and social power and everything related to that power. Corruption, of course, is part of that.”

In 1984, Vargas Llosa published “Against the Wind and the Tide,” an account of his disillusionment with leftist politics. “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” (1988), the author’s most recent political novel, is the highly praised story of a despairing anti-hero caught between a society full of misery and corruption and the quandary over how he can change it. He chooses revolution, and fails. Vargas Llosa involves himself in the story by acting as an investigative reporter in search of the aging revolutionary.

Vargas Llosa’s recent novels are less historical and social and more introspective and psychological. His 10th and latest work, “In Praise of the Stepmother,” explores eroticism and the ambiguous nature of childhood innocence. Its protagonist, Fonchito, is a perverse innocent, half angel, half devil.

Vargas Llosa said that when he returns to his writer’s studio, he intends to write a novel about the little-known but fascinating Flora Tristan, a 19th-Century social critic who has become the prototype for Peruvian feminists.

“I just read a book she wrote shortly after visiting England in the early 1800s,” he said. “Her account is absolutely incredible.” Even as the novelist spoke, it seemed as if his hands were itching to get to a typewriter and begin work.

That project may have to wait.