When politics stir emotional response

In 1990, internationally acclaimed novelist, playwright, critic and journalist Mario Vargas Llosa waged an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of Peru. It’s hard to imagine any of our North American literary figures becoming this politically active, apart from those perennial intellectual gadflies and sparring partners, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

Vargas Llosa first gained fame in the early 1960s with a novelistic expose of the brutal military school he attended as a youth. Although he started out as a socialist, his disillusionment with revolutions that resulted in repression rather than freedom led him to redefine himself as a liberal. (In Latin America and Europe, one should remember, the term “liberal” has a somewhat different meaning than in the United States: In addition to championing individual liberty, freedom of the press and the separation of church and state, these liberals are explicitly anti-statist and tend to be strong supporters of the free market and laissez-faire economics.)

Like many prominent Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa is intensely interested in politics, but even more devoted to literature. He is a worldly writer in the best sense of the word: intelligent, urbane, well-traveled, well-informed, cosmopolitan, free-thinking and free-speaking. Since 1977, he has written, every other Sunday, a column called “Touchstone” for Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais. His latest book, “The Language of Passion,” is a collection of 46 of these columns, mostly from the 1990s.

Provocative, insightful and often surprising, the essays treat an impressive range of topics, including but not limited to: birth control, women’s rights, the Middle East, Latin America, postmodern literary criticism, romance novels, religious sects, the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, the reggae music of Bob Marley, the paintings of Vermeer, the character of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Rio’s famous Carnaval.

The titular essay pays tribute to the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz: “Though he never lost the passion that seethes between the lines on even his calmest pages, Octavio Paz was first of all a thinker.... He loved the meaning of words as much as their music, and when words flowed from his pen, they were always obliged to say something, to appeal to the intelligence of the reader as well as to his sensibility and his ear.”

As a free-market liberal, Vargas Llosa is a defender of globalism but not a mindless -- or heartless -- one. Unlike many champions of the marketplace, he sometimes has qualms about its perversions. Of a newly privatized, modernized Peru, he notes: “[T]he economic developments still affect only a tiny fraction of the population, the top sliver of society, while the sacrifices demanded of the majority are enormous. The opening of borders raised prices to international heights, while salaries remain at underdevelopment levels, and hundreds of thousands of families go hungry or barely get by.”

His sympathy with the poor also shines through essays like “Fataumata’s Feet,” which movingly and angrily portrays the hardships and vicious xenophobia faced by an African immigrant woman in Spain.

Globalism also appeals to Vargas Llosa in that it fosters the erosion of national, ethnic and racial boundaries as well as the divisive nationalisms and identity politics that go with them. For him, the only identity that matters is individual identity. In a 1995 column on “French Identity,” he writes: “Any concerns about the ‘identity’ of a human group make my hair stand on end, because I’ve become convinced that behind them always lurks a conspiracy against individual freedom.”

“The concept of [group] identity ... ,” he continues, “is reductive and dehumanizing, a magic ideological filter that extracts all original and creative human traits, anything that hasn’t been imposed by inheritance or geographic location or social pressure but has come out of the ability to resist those influences and counteract them with free acts, independently conceived.”

Although a declared agnostic, Vargas Llosa does not share the contempt for religion that is often a component of anticlericalism. “For the vast majority of human beings, religion is the only path leading to a spiritual life and an ethical conscience,” he notes. As he sees it, all religions and all sects, no matter how old and venerable or how cultish and unconventional, suffer from the same serious flaw: “All ... are dogmatic and self-contained, convinced that they alone possess the absolute truth and the moral authority to impose that truth on the rest of the world, even if doing so requires bloodshed.” The business of the state, he concludes, is to allow all to flourish but permit none to gain a foothold in the state.

In an essay titled “A Defense of Sects,” Vargas Llosa comments on Germany’s dispute with the Church of Scientology. He offers a lucid, witty and deeply felt defense of the principle of separation of church and state: “It’s fine to accuse Tom Cruise and his beautiful wife, Nicole Kidman, of impoverished sensibilities and terrible literary taste if they prefer reading the scientific theological productions of L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology

Although it is often said that emotion and reason are opposing forces in the human soul, it is truer that the best writing comes from a combination of passion and intelligence. Certainly, both qualities are evident in the fiery and illuminating essays of “The Language of Passion.”